Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong on how the pandemic has cracked open discrimination against Asian American communities — In the fall of 2019 I received an email from the poet and critic Cathy Park Hong telling me she had written an essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She asked me to read it and consider it for a blurb. I receive roughly three or four requests…

Lee Isaac Chung’s film took me through his past and into my own family’s story — I’ve had the feeling of following the film Minari around for a few months now since the first time I saw the trailer last year. I guessed Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari would be different to me from just about any other film I’d seen from how, even those two minutes…

A story about a short story with at least three lives — I have a story in Kink, a new anthology that came out last week edited by R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, two writers I love and admire enormously. Kwon’s moving story of the genesis of the anthology is worth your time. My story’s title, “Best Friendster Date Ever,” one…

I hoped watching The Durrells In Corfu would offer an escape from the dark of winter, but instead, found a meditation on the male bumbler. — The Durrells in Corfu (2016) Keeley Hawes, Josh O'Connor, Milo Parker, Daisy Waterstone, and Callum Woodhouse in The Durrells (2016)www.imdb.com Last month, as the winter began, I was hoping to escape but there was nowhere to go: the surge of cases due to holiday travel had filled the hospitals across the country, and the weather was cold, which made socializing into cold walks with friends where we wore masks and…

The stories we have about apocalypse don’t seem to take in how they are actually happening in real time. So what are they even for? — I have a new essay at the New Republic, a review of the new novels by Don DeLillo and Jonathan Lethem. I wrote about how their novels seem to describe different parts of the same apocalypse — the DeLillo describing the day it happened, and the Lethem telling a story…

1/9/2021 Chelsea, VT Too often, dates at the start of chapters in fiction do less than the author imagines. …

Dreams, recipes, links, unsent tweets, facts that stick around. — “I’m sorry, I can’t read anything right now, but have fun with it!” — Unsent tweet from my draft’s file, with no available context, back in March. I woke up the other day to the sound of a doorbell. My husband was still asleep. I got up and went to…

The first spell you cast as a writer, you cast on yourself. — What is often lost in talk of craft in writing is the exploration of sentiment, and as a result what is almost never discussed is how sentiment is described or even conjured, so this is a good question for aiming at that topic directly. So much advice about writing acts…

To prepare for a MFA in writing, focus on community and a writing practice first. — It is MFA application season, and I’ve received a number of variations on this question from students to which I have a single answer, and so I’ve decided to offer that answer here. I typically do not answer as to their readiness with a single yes or no — I…