Double Feature! Two Short Stories in Whisk(e)y Tit

Very excited to announce that Whisk(e)y Tit Press has published not one but TWO of my short stories in Issue 11 of the Whisk(ey) Tit Journal! WT is a fiesty independent press that publishes some truly — and I use this word lovingly — weird books, so it’s an honor to be recognized by them.

I have to give a huge thank you specifically to Philip Shelley, the Journal‘s co-editor, who had to resort to commenting on one of my Instagram posts to get my attention when for some reason his emails weren’t reaching my inbox (and I never check Insta DMs from people I don’t know lol). Thanks to his tenacity, I was able to accept WT’s publishing offer at the absolute last moment possible before the issue went to print.

The two stories chosen for publication seemed like distinct entities in my mind. I wrote Studiers of Stone back in 2020 and I finished Antenatal just three months ago, so I didn’t realize until just now that both explore similar themes: societal expectations of the female body as well as how a person’s identity is reflected (or not reflected) in their physical form. I’m not too surprised. All writers are haunted by a few tropes that they’ll never write out of their system, and for me, that’s the tension between society and identity, in particular how a person can feel simultaneously loved yet isolated.

These two stories had different journeys though. Studiers of Stone began as a mash-up of several unrelated scribbles. I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be for a long time. It went through multiple drafts and workshops with editors, and then I tossed away all that work to do a near-total rewrite because I finally decided I wanted the ending to be hopeful instead of bleak.

Meanwhile, Antenatal came to me almost fully formed. I knew exactly what the story would be but it sat as an unfinished draft in my phone’s notes for a while. After I wrote it out and cleaned it up, the only person who reviewed it was my spouse, since I wanted a trans person to critique whether my trans character’s narrative rang true. 

I’m so grateful that Whisk(ey) Tit has given these two stories a chance to reach people. As always, I hope that my writing helps someone feel less alone and less unseen, and also helps someone else see the world in a new light.

“Conjugation” in Apollo’s Decathlon

My poem Conjugation was selected to appear in Apollo’s Decathlon, an olympiad culminating in a multimedia summer exhibition at Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art in the Loire Valley, France.

Invited artists, each representing one of the 203 countries participating in the 2024 Paris Olympics, competed in one of ten categories: painting, drawing, poetry, music, digital art/new media, sculpture, performance, fiction, installation, and photography. 

My piece was on view as part of the “Conceptual Olympiad” exhibition at Château de Montsoreau from 14 June 2024 through 11 August 2024.

 

CONJUGATION

 

What he cares about most is how a character like him

            becomes a legend. A few strokes of ink,

handsome enough to be repeated and

recalled,     understood, a symbol in people’s mouths, a mess

           of meaning sealed in a glyph and welcomed into a permanent dictionary

 

            He is        男   Man        A rice field (田) paired with strength (力)

Gender as labor          Destined for dirt and defined by infinitely finite strength

Bent over the muck, tool in hand, he assesses

 

            女      Woman       Three fine strokes containing a space that creates universes

 

He envies how she can’t be broken down into radicals    She is

            a radical         She is exactly what she is      An icon

            Written quickly or smudged, she is easily mistaken for   文     literature itself

But he is a singular fairytale, a story of work with no promise of reward

 

            Once upon a time, he was     侽     not just field and strength but

also   人     Human                                            Two strokes like a crucifix 

                  How wonderful to levy one’s humanity into a staff of sorts,

                  something to lean on when the hot sun grew too big or stayed too long

                                                                                                                                              overhead

 

But then one day it vanished or was stolen or maybe it just became

                      more popular to strut through the rows of seeds without the burden of 人

Can fight anything when you’re light

on your feet, from lipids to hippos

                                              Legends fight barehanded

 

They don’t work barehanded though

To enter the fray without a weapon is bravery –

                                                                                     to enter the fields without a tool is idiocy

 

            And the happy ending?

            That ultimate conjugation all legends charge          towards?

When literature woman and labor man step into one

            another and become each other’s radicals, when

                      they become parts of a single

                      whole, the result is

 

                      merely 娚                                   Loud talking

 

Ink / Mud

Some pleasant news amidst the craziness of the world right now: my short story Ink / Mud took second place at the 2019 Hackney Literary Awards!

Since the story is going to be published in a future issue of the Birmingham Arts Journal, I’ll just post a snippet here for now:

People liked to see twins together, names and outfits in sync – Nicole and Katherine, Nikki and Kitty – and classified us out loud to their children and friends. You get used to being looked at as something special. Whenever our parents took us out separately, on excursions recommended by psychologists to encourage us to develop as individuals, I felt uninteresting, reduced. But Nicole hated being part of a set. No matter how much she loved me and I loved her, I couldn’t change that. She constructed a firm boundary around her, one I had to knock on to enter, one where permission was not always granted. At least in high school, even if we rarely spoke on schoolgrounds, she was nearby, her orbit tugging at mine.

Freshman year at college was like re-learning to walk after the loss of a limb. Autumn settled into a belligerent winter. My incessant texts to my sister went unanswered for days. She’d mention weekend plans or new friends, and I’d pretend I was busy too. If my roommate was out, I escaped to the library or the art studio or a party. Anyone’s party. When I was by myself, I wound down, my clockwork actions growing slower and slower until I could only stare into space. But by the time the campus belly-flopped into spring, I managed to reach a wobbly equilibrium. I was beginning to see myself as my own center of gravity when, in the final heat-swollen days of the semester, Nicole appeared unannounced at the tattoo parlor where I worked part-time. Thrilled, bewildered, I was simultaneously reset and off-kilter.

Sentimental Cartography

 

Super crazy excited that my short story “Sentimental Cartography” is being featured by Ohio State’s literary magazine The Journal. I had such an amazing time working with the editors, whose feedback was invaluable AND they even nominated my story for a Pushcart Prize! 

(*^▽^*)

Although Madeleine de Scudéry mapped Tenderness in the 17th century, it wasn’t until the 1840s that explorers seriously attempted to map a woman’s heart. 

Atlases were being updated monthly in those days. There were redrawn maps of the earth. The sea. Stars. Bones. The lungs of the nation expanded, ribs cracking, Mexico elbowed aside. Texas shed its republic and was slotted into the role of state. Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin were also christened. California glimmered in the far west, Antarctica in the south, dreamlands of gold or snow. The King of Hawai’i and the electrical telegraph both found God. But most startling was Neptune’s leap from a star to a planet. 

Perhaps it was that – a light thought to be fixed in place revealed as mobile, unreliable, migrant – that spurred men to reexamine their mothers and mistresses, wives and daughters, these frequently observed yet unmapped territories. One’s garden was always the last to be considered explorable, the steps too familiar, the paths too trodden. But sudden mud could grip one’s ankles. Beloved perennials could evaporate. One’s own memory could stumble. With trains and telegraphy rushing to knit the world together, it was becoming clear that ostensibly known spheres, Womanhood in particular, could not remain unclassified. 

De Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre, with its winding, amorous French routes, was denounced as an inadequate guide, primarily because it was nestled in a novel that spanned ten volumes and no one had time for that now that words flew on electricity. The official reason for the censure, however, was that de Scudéry’s extensive education would have weighed down her expeditions, and as she was female, she would have been biased in favor of the locals. Besides, she never married. Another attempt at surveying the heart came seventy-six years after de Scudéry’s death. Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf detailed a map of The Empire of Love, but as this Reich included the Land of Lust, Swamp of Profanity and Bachelor Country, it was presumed to chart only a man’s heart.

Breitkopf’s bold efficiency and musical typeface made him the personal hero of Joseph Husson, a clerk in the typography department of a Bostonian printing press profiting nicely off the constant updates of the 1840s. A snail of a man who flinched into retreat under a steady gaze, he dabbled in drawing maps, though would remain an amateur for his entire life. The smell of linseed oil clung to his nearly-fashionable clothes. When the word cartographie crossed the Atlantic, dropping the original ending, as immigrants do, Husson remodeled every conversation into an opportunity to deploy this new word. Predictably, he became a plague on social events. If he became the first to successfully map a woman’s heart, he bet they wouldn’t be so quick to snicker. 

Husson prepared the necessary supplies at the office, but the only woman he is reported to have kept regular company with was his elder sister, Marcy, who had a habit of resting her cheek into her left fingertips whenever she gazed into a novel. This always gave the impression that she was reading something shocking. It was an old-fashioned gesture and didn’t suit her at all, but that was the picture that appeared in the papers. She’d made the evening post because of her spectacular separation from a recently bankrupted railroad tycoon, who was also a well-known crossdresser. The crossdressing wasn’t the reason she left him, though she had to claim it was, since the divorce wouldn’t have been granted if they uncovered her collusion. Unmoored, she commandeered a bed in her flustered brother’s apartment around the time he embarked on his quest to chart a woman’s heart. Historians have debated the extent of her influence on his expedition. A percentage of his firsthand observations may actually be hers. 

The length of Husson’s mission remains vague, but the result was mapped in oil and pigment and gum and salt and acid wash. Terrain was etched into soft stone and wet lithographs were birthed. The heart was affixed squirming onto thick paper, painted by hand and sold in batches…

Continue reading HERE!