There’s so many queer Asian women, like so many. But you don’t see much of that in literature. But I think that more and more of us are writing and publishing now. It’s a game changer and it’s just awesome.
It’s a little borscht belt schtick but also an expression of sadness so deep that it can’t even tell if it is sad any more.
I adore creating self-organized, magical-dreamy, messy-beautiful spaces of all kinds in which everyone feels empowered and “in it together,” and collaborative book projects are just one more type of those spaces.
I never wrote anything beyond a few notes on my phone while I was home . . . When it was all so close, I felt like I couldn’t see any of it properly. I found it much more generative to recall the settings from a distance, through memory.
I might be biased, but I think poetry is maybe the best place to imagine a better world. Not least of which because the tools are so cheap (pen and paper, or even just speech and dreams), making it a widely accessible form.
I believe that it’s important to acknowledge the ugly feelings. Don’t stuff them, suppress them, ignore them. I don’t like to be jealous, but I’m not going to pretend I’m not.
I can’t imagine writing a tight little novel that isn’t haunted by the absurd, un-fact-checkable and incomplete oral histories that raised me.
We’re always trying to compress experience into words, our lives into stories, and it’s impossible to get it exactly right. But almost everything that’s beautiful in life comes from giving it an honest shot.
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the greatest Russian writer fans of nineteenth-century literature have never heard of.
It could be the booming voice of an angel, it could be a jinn, or somebody standing behind a hill, shouting at you, and as a poet I don’t discriminate too much. I just need the raw material.