I'm really thankful to the Jellyfish Review for giving this flash essay a home, and Mythic Picnic for your sponsorship of this wonderful issues featuring writers of color. 

Special thanks to my workshop mates from Clarion, and from my Bay Area writing group for ushering me to be emotionally honest about the cultural clashes as expressed through food and family, with some raw squid jokes. I also thank all of the literary journals that sent encouraging rejection letters that pointed me in the direction I needed to take.

Thank you for reading. 

I've been revisiting books of thought to help form experience and meaning between life and lives right now:

1. Fred Moten's three "consent not to being a single being" books from Duke University Press.
2. Patricia Smith's "Incendiary Art," from Triquarterly Press.
3. Arundhati Roy's "My Seditious Heart," from Haymarket Books.
4. Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin's edited anthology, "The Djinn Falls in Love and other stories," from Solaris.
5. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's "On the Destruction of Art--of Conflict and Art" from the dOCUMENTA (13) project.
   
   

Recent articles I've returned to this month, again and again:

1. "Crying, Laughing, Crying at the George Floyd Protests in Minneapolis," by Danez Smith
   
2. "Solace," by Megan Giddings
3. "Top 5 Ways to Erase Racism According to White People," Michael Harriot
4. "The Pandemic is a portal," Arundhati Roy

Some of the best content from cultural-critics right now are available on social media--make sure to follow them all! Enjoy. Eat well and stay safe.

Thank you to the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Booksmith, for organizing a virtual reading featuring Laura and I. I'm so grateful for our Bay Area Literary community, to further hold space for our craft and freedom of expression in these uncertain, chaotic times. Thank you to the San Francisco Arts Commission for giving me the funds to continue to do what I do.

This Is a Reading followed by a Q&A featuring my high school friends from Hong Kong. It was like a terrifying wedding--I got to see how my literary friends met my childhood friends, in a professional setting. 

Farnaz Fatemi from The Hive: Poetry Collective interviewed me on how poetry has influenced my prose, my thoughts on the genre differentiations, and how I use craft methods from poetry to inform my prose.

It's a beginner's craft talk peppered with anecdotes about coming from a non-literary background (shoutout to Hong Kong!) my teaching experiences, and also woetry--the subgenre of just terrible poetry.

The originally went live on December 23rd on KSQD 90.7 FM while I was flying in the air, so sad to have missed it. 

Will be at Djerassi until November 20th, 2019 working on my short story collection. So far, a lot of reading and quoting has been done, but no writing yet!

I can't write without my:

1. Archimycheal Simply Pad: 50 grid sheets on eye care paper at 28 x 14 cm
2. Sarasa Dry Gel pens in 0.5mm
3. Tipp-Ex
4. Muji highlighters
5. Microsoft Word (I know everyone loves Scrivener, but I like real post-its)
6. Post-its, the cuter the better. There's never a Daiso too far away.