Anna Maria Hong

Five questions for Janice Lee

After a little hiatus, I’m back with this interview with writer, editor, publisher, designer, and scholar Janice Lee. Currently based in Portland, OR, Janice is the author of three books of fiction: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), and two books of creative nonfiction: Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015) and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016).

She is also the founder and executive editor of Entropy magazine, copublisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, a contributing editor at Fanzine, and cofounder of The Accomplices LLC, as well as an assistant professor of creative writing at Portland State University.

On the 'Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word' Panel at AWP

Anna Maria Hong

“Vietnam Is a Seven-Letter Word” panelists.

On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled “Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.” I was familiar with some of the writers presenting but not all of them, and I was intrigued by the description, which noted that “women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned ‘identities’ and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.”

Five questions for Alan Lau

Anna Maria Hong

‘slumber’ by Alan Lau, courtesy of the ArtXchange Gallery

For this week’s commentary, I interviewed the poet, visual artist, and editor Alan Lau. Alan has served as the arts editor for the Seattle-based Asian Pacific Islander American newspaper The International Examiner for over thirty years, curating the paper’s literary, visual, and performing arts coverage and the book review supplement the Pacific Reader.

On Ginger Ko's 'Ghosts, Models, Visions' (2017)

Anna Maria Hong

Cover of Ginger Ko’s ‘Ghosts, Models, Visions’

The speakers in Ginger Ko’s chapbook Ghosts, Models, Visions contemplate the peculiarities of living in the present and a near-future populated by post-human automatons, strangely evolved mammals, and the unborn. All of these entities have a voice in this collection, along with seemingly regular human beings, and all are subject to the numbing effects of late capitalism, enacting labor that divorces the mind from the body and the self from its selves, and straining under unyielding debt in spite of constant effort.

On Tan Lin's 'Insomnia and the Aunt' (2011)

Anna Maria Hong

Television before the golden age — pre-internet, before streaming, and way before Asian Americans enjoyed substantive roles as reasonably flawed human beings and protagonists — is also a subject of Tan Lin’s ambient novel Insomnia and the Aunt, which blends fiction and multimedia memoir to deliver the portrait of an enigmatic relative who may or may not be real.

Like many poets, I consume large quantities of television, bingeing on excellent and dumb shows as a way to wind down after teaching or writing or other emotionally drafting activity. Poets, of course, are not the only people who do this, TV being the centripetal force that it is and that it has been for nearly a century.

Tweens: Asian American Poetry & Poetics in the 2010s From now through the end of March, I will be writing short commentaries on live events and recent poetry collections by Asian Pacific Islander American poets. I’m focusing on this period, as we begin a new year toward the end of a decade full of upheaval and rife with the feeling of imminent doom, which happens to have been a particularly rich era for publication by APIA poets with a widening of aesthetic approaches and styles, ethnic diversification beyond the first waves of APIA writing, and a burgeoning of voices young and established.

A few of my commentaries will feature interviews with the directors and editors of some of the Asian American literary venues and organizations that have abetted this boon. Some commentaries will also feature visual art by APIA artists, beginning with this banner image of Generations: 500 hundred human years in dogs/trade by the Seattle-based artist Saya Moriyasu (many thanks to the G. Gibson Gallery). My goal is not to provide a comprehensive survey, which is of course impossible, but to briefly investigate some of the currents in this literary sound.

I’ve invoked the word tweens partly because I like the youthful connotations of the word, which seem to aptly evoke this energetic resurgence, and partly to unsettle the old positing of Asian Americans as living “between two worlds,” which always struck me as off the mark, while sincerely trying to get at some real feeling of unbelonging. Tweens also references this young decade of the twenty-first century (between ten and twenty) as well as my interest in hybrid forms that blend poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, that speak to history and personal experience. Many of the works that I’ll examine here will do that. Thank you for visiting, viewing, and reading, and a felicitous 2019 to you and yours.

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America's 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry, fiction, and essay in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry,and many other places. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American, an anthology of fiction and memoir. She joined the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018 and is a board member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

The International Examiner