In both Bestiary and the upcoming story collection Gods of Want, K-Ming connects Victoria Chang’s practice of “language first, then ideas” with her own playfulness in writing and digression as storytelling. She also elaborates on myths and mythologies as communally owned stories and her own aims of rewriting them to recenter intimate matriarchal and matrimonial diaspora.

In her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, Susan Nguyen examines how the physical and social body is a site where language, diaspora, and the image of the American Dream are resurrected through questioning. In the conversation, we return to this idea of language in translation, whether language(s) can be shared, the preservation of language, and how sensorial imagery helps supplement what cannot be contained.

Dr. Max Liboiron (Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John’s, NL) discusses their book Pollution is Colonialism, CLEAR, science and technology studies, and how not to reproduce colonialism in the lab and beyond. They make nuanced distinctions between Western science/dominant science, community peer review/academic peer review, and universalism/place-based, distinctions which if recognized can support anti-colonial action.

Soon Wiley simultaneously deconstructs and critiques the mystery plot in his debut novel When We Fell Apart. In thinking about the two different perspectives as told through the two narrators, Soon reflects upon unreliable characters, their testimonies, lived experiences, and spatial and geopolitical spaces (specifically between Seoul and the United States).

Dr. Nick Estes (University of Minnesota) discusses the writing of his book, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance and critiques ahistorical narratives told through the Western framework of time. In the interview, he also gives important overviews on Indigenous internationalism and futures, how law is interpreted, and shares upcoming writing projects.

Juniper Fitzgerald talks about her upcoming book, Enjoy Me Among My Ruins published by Feminist Press. Viewing her story as a reclamation project, she talks about playing with structure and writing against the progressive linear timeline by sharing fragments of her experiences as a sex worker, an academic and a mother, the significance of Lolita, journal entries, and letters to Dr. Scully.

Ariana Brown discusses the genealogy of her debut full-length poetry collection, We Are Owed. Reflecting on her research on Texas history, what was taught in the classroom, studying the archives of slavery, anti-blackness, and how to avoid the tendency to be nostalgic for a heritage country, Ariana considers a different origin story that moves beyond the concept of Borderlands, nations, and nation-states.

Jennifer Huang discusses their debut poetry collection, Return Flight, and how it is a sort of travelogue on diaspora as they reflect on the idea of home, their departures and returns, and research on Taiwanese martial law. In the interview, Jennifer connects additional themes of languages, what cannot be said or translated, erasure as form, Taiwan and the United States, food, and ancestral altar tables.

Dr. Elizabeth Farfán-Santos previews her upcoming book, Undocumented Motherhood: Conversation on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing, a creative text based on her research on the health impacts of political, racial, and medical exclusion of undocumented immigrant communities in the United States. In the interview, she shares the genealogy of the project, the limits of theoretical language that obscures human stories and complexity, and the concept of a person and care work. 

Centering Weike Wang’s essay, “Notes on Work” published in The New Yorker, we discuss how her views on work in Chemistry and Joan Is Okay intersects with the model minority myth, craft writing/workshopping, and her experiences as both a doctoral student in an epidemiology program and an MFA student. Wang also shares why she revised Joan Is Okay to include Covid and whether her future writing projects will allude to the ongoing pandemic.