A Dream Come True For Me
My flash nonfiction piece, “Not Done with the World” appeared today in the New York Times. After a series of disappointments, setbacks, and heartbreaks for me these past two years in my writing career, this publication means so much to me.
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Alternate title: "Male Characters in Search of Female Characters who Can Force them to Get out of their Daily Routine and Finally Evolve"
Men Without Women is a familiar, easily identifiable, and oddly comforting book for the Murakami reader, privileging the emotional landscape of lonely Japanese men through scaffolding characterization, personal idiosyncrasy, and monkey-wrench narratives instead of dramatic Hollywood plot lines, food porn, or cultural didacticism.
Read MoreFew things push plot lines as well as vengeance in drama and leveling up in RPGs, which is why Dishonored 2, despite its many flaws, integrates plot, adventure, and history effortlessly into a unified field, centering its narrative on the propulsive quest of assassination and personal redemption. Much like Victorian morality in the nineteenth century, this game is a Manichean fantasy world of good and evil.
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According to the rules of the feminist thriller novel Out, murder becomes its own infinite regress.
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Today I got an email telling me that my personal essay, "When Words Make You Real," was accepted in the mixed-race anthology The Beiging of America, which is awesome. I'm happy, proud even, to be part of such a groundbreaking but also crucial anthology exploring what it means to be mixed race (in my case, hapa) in America.
Guernica Daily 17 August 2016
There was a flower arrangement to our entrées, a harmony of light and darkness inside the dining room, a small ceremony for the chilled chickpeas and sun-dried tomatoes, crisp Arugula salads, haunting ginger slices and incinerating Thai soups, that was uniquely Japanese in spirit and decor
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I agonize over my own workshop pedagogy now that the mic is in my hand. This agony comes partially from memory: I remember the completely avoidable trauma I experienced in my own MFA program as a hapa fiction writer whose racial and cultural legibility was confusing at best and dismissed at worst.
Read MoreMatthew Salesses runs and directs an awesome column at Pleiades about workshop craft and workshop pedagogy and I'm happy to say that my essay "The Velocity of Flying Objects" about my own workshop methodology will be published soon on the magazine's website. Stay tuned.
My newest piece on textual hyperabundance. the rise of the online commentocracy class, and the way the internet has fundamentally changed the way we read, is now up at the always-awesome Daily Dot.
My cultural analysis essay on how the internet has fundamentally changed the way we read everything was accepted at The Daily Dot and should be out soon. Stay tuned!
In perhaps the shortest turnaround the in history of publishing, my essay "The Day I Lost Rock 'N' Roll" (renamed"Jim Morrison, Where The Bombs Don't Fly") was published today in the always awesome Boston Review only one week after it was accepted! This piece is about the day I was searching for Jim Morrison's Grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris on the beginning of the Iraq Invasion when I ran into two German tourists doing the same. Together, we wandered around the cemetery as three foreigners until we finally found the rock star's grave. This lyrical essay explores the concept of war, memory, tourism and estrangement, and the impossibility of forgetting.
There are a lot of things I'm not qualified to write about (of course,
this has never stopped writers before). But one of the things I feel
I'm eminently qualified to do is write about love. I've been in love
more than once. I've been in too many relationships to count. Some of
them have been horrendous slogs, others ephemeral + dramatic flare-ups, +
quite a few fell somewhere in between. Either way, one thing I'm good
at is connected to one thing I believe in wholeheartedly, which is the
capacity for humans to love + the redemptive place that love can play in
our culture. My life would have no value without it. My best writing
comes from a place of love (of characters, places, experiences,
languages, ideas, etc., etc.). My best relationships are overflowing
with that stuff too. Anyway, this time I wrote a lyrical essay about my relationship with LB, which the Good Men Project was
happy to publish because they love it when men talk about love. If you
have time, I hope you'll read it + tell me what you think about my
piece, "How to Stay in Love."