In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rachel Finn-Lohmann
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rachel Finn-Lohmann
Your short story “Squeaky” in Volume 25 is about a teacher who torments a sixth-grade student in his classroom. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
The story is based on a real experience I had when I was a sixth-grader. It’s something I tried to forget for a long time, but then I started writing about it the summer after I graduated from college. A couple things happened that made me start thinking about the experience again. I coincidentally met another woman who was bullied by the same teacher, in the same way that I was, several years before me. Realizing my experience was part of a larger pattern helped me look back on the situation differently. I also happened to read the short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh around that same time. It’s also written from the perspective of a teacher, and it gave me the idea to write a story from the point of view of the teacher who had bullied me.
There’s such a delicate balance of style and content in your story, with particular regards to its tone. Early on, “Squeaky” feels light and seems a little funny, but there’s an uncomfortable shift that occurs when it becomes clear how caustic and inappropriate this teacher is. Did you always have this story written from his point of view?
I never thought about writing the story from any other perspective. During that school year, and afterward, I spent a lot of time thinking about things from my teacher’s point of view. I wondered what made him treat me the way he did, why he hated me so much. I tried to see myself through his eyes. I spent much more time thinking about what he was thinking than I did reflecting on my own feelings. So by the time I started writing the story, his perspective felt more accessible to me than my own. As soon as I started writing in his voice, I found unexpected humor in it, and it was cathartic to be able to laugh at something that had once been so scary. But towards the end of the story I felt the humor slipping away, and I knew that I needed to let it go, to let it not be funny again. I do see the humor in it now, but the fear and discomfort are still there too.
It certainly seems that “Squeaky” would be a different story if it had been told from a different POV. Do you consider the teacher to be an unreliable narrator?
He’s definitely unreliable, but he’s such a bad liar that the unreliability becomes pretty transparent pretty quickly. For a while I played with making him seem more likable at first, to keep the truth of him more of a surprise, but it never rang true.
We really get a sense of buzzing tension building from descriptions of and reactions from characters like Mr. Yancey or the high-ponytail girls who mime what the reader feels or should feel about this teacher. What is your process for writing these extraneous characters who are crucial to the tension in a story but are not as prominent as main characters are?
There was actually a lot more attention placed on those types of secondary characters in my earliest drafts. As I started turning my memories of that school year into a story, everything that stuck out strongly in my recollections felt important to include. Then I had to prune back everything that didn’t directly shed light on the relationship between Squeaky and Mr. H. The other students in the room, and Mr. Yancey, became most important as voices who could challenge Mr. H’s perspective at crucial moments. Readers never really hear from Squeaky directly about the way Mr. H is treating her, but those other witnesses give her a kind of voice in the narrative. They see what’s happening to her, and through their dialogue, they speak directly to the reader about it in a way that she isn’t really able to.
An aspect of literary fiction that can feel unnerving to a reader is how real these types of stories seem, like how a prototype or aspects of a character like this teacher really exists out there in the world. Do you enjoy building these types of bad characters? Is any part of it that’s challenging to write because of how authentic and accurate these characters appear?
Several times when I was workshopping this story, I got feedback from readers that it just didn’t seem realistic that a teacher would act this way, and they couldn’t buy into the story because of that. At first, I didn’t really know what to make of that, because the story was so closely based on my real experiences. And there were always other readers who spoke up to say that it didn’t surprise them at all that a teacher would act this way. I think to a certain degree, the experiences people have will influence how real the story seems to them. People who’ve had horrible teachers know that they’re out there, and others are lucky enough to be surprised that a teacher like this could even exist. But the feedback from the disbelievers ultimately helped me work on building the world around Squeaky and Mr. H more precisely, to help readers see how a teacher might end up abusing their power in this way.
Let’s talk about Squeaky! In a move that threw me and delighted me, you name yourself in the story as this character. Tell us about your choice for that. What did it feel like to include yourself, or even just your real name, as a part of this story? Do you consider any bit of it to be autofiction?
I went back and forth on this choice a lot, and got a lot of mixed feedback about it. Ultimately, I felt like including my name added an additional layer to the story that I didn’t want to lose. I think Squeaky would be a flatter character if I didn’t tie her to my present/writer self in some way, and I wanted to give readers a little hint that the whole narrative has an additional layer to it: future Squeaky, or a version of her, is speaking about what happened to her, in her teacher’s voice. I do consider the story to be autofiction, although since I’m not writing from my own perspective, I had to lean heavily into the fiction and let myself make my teacher into a character I could speak for. Of course, his thoughts and narration are all made up, but so much of the action and dialogue are based on things I remember him doing or saying to me. Acknowledging that in some way felt important, so I kept my name in.
Can you recall any of your favorite books or writers from when you were a young reader? Who are some writers that you love now?
I’ve always been drawn to stories that include elements of metafictionality, stories within stories, autofiction: anything that breaks the fourth wall and blurs the lines between real world and story world. When I was younger I remember loving books by Louis Sachar and Eleanor Estes, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and the series Inkheart and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Also, like most of my generation, I was a big Harry Potter fan. Some writers I love now are E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Maggie Nelson, and George Saunders. If I start making a longer list I’ll go forever, so I’ll stop there. My favorite book about a teacher is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’m working on a collection of linked short stories, and a middle grade historical fantasy novel. When my adult project gets too heavy, I work on the middle grade one, and it’s kind of my writing comfort blanket.
I’m also midway through my first year as an eighth grade English teacher right now, so my biggest project at the moment is being the best teacher I can be for my students. I definitely think that responsibility weighs a little heavier on my shoulders because of what I went through as a middle schooler; I know what a big impact a teacher can have, good or bad.
Rachel Finn-Lohmann is a writer and middle school English teacher. She recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Plum Creek Review, Plain China, and The Charles Carter. She lives in Pasadena, California, with her partner, Isabel, and their dog, Arlo.
Heartworm by Adam Scheffler, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
Adam Scheffler’s second poetry collection Heartworm, winner of the 2021 Moon City Poetry Prize, is a bewildering cacophony of subject matters—small or grand, turned over and studied with such rapt attention from a quizzical mind. Packaged into a tidy assortment, Scheffler’s acute observations pulse with charming delight in this prudent book on life: the emotional ebbs and flows of the creative worker, the decimation of American employee unions, and the obsessive tinkering of a person perfecting the invention of a machine, to the ways in which we interact online. Cockroaches and racehorses, this book covers it all.
Take for instance artificial intelligence which of late has entered more conversations on writing and thinking. Scheffler demonstrates in “Autocomplete” that this software function built into our email and text settings affords us a type of freedom we may not have been aware existed. Now technology can do the work for us if we type one clause or phrase:
Why does death come in threes, happen, scare me, hurt so much, row
exist, make us sad, hurt.
But these predicted texts based on algorithms are not just for fun or to make writing easier; our thoughts are predicated by the insidiousness of technological programming and interpretation. Some, as noted by Scheffler, cut a little deeper, and perhaps might make us pause a moment:
Why do I feel happy after crying, when it rains, at night, all of a
sudden, but empty.
Being online is not simply just clicking around the Internet anymore. Scheffler is keenly aware of how group settings and interactions can erode the sense of the individual in how we project how we want others to see a certain image of ourselves. This curation can easily veer into a hive-mind territory, where what is seen might not be truth. In “Facebook” he writes that the social media giant Meta makes us adopt a different persona, a “casual debasement” where:
everyone being together
so easily, for such a chummy picnic
of the mind, could be so dull.
This “casual debasement” is reimaged in “Checkout” when Scheffler witnesses an elderly cashier working a Christmas Eve shift at Walmart. What does it say about our society when our most vulnerable populations perform manual labor, in costumes no less, so the richest of us continue to get richer? If people were to ask what good can poetry do, consider how Scheffler flips the question back on the reader:
A poem can’t tell you what it’s like
to be 83 and seven hours deep
into a Christmas Eve shift
at Walmart, cajoling
beeps from objects like the secret
name each of us will never
be sweetly called.
These rhetorical questions that Scheffler poses place great emphasis on social consciousness. Who do we belong to if not ourselves? Heartworm is a reckoning on things seen and unseen, acknowledged and unacknowledged. In “Ode to Zamboni Machines,” a meandering expose on obsessions and regrets, he ponders that:
there’s no such thing as one’s
life’s work being finished to oneself, but only to
others.
Just as Frank Zamboni’s work on the ice resurfacer was met with skepticism, Scheffler wonders about the ineffable conundrum of being a creative person with a public identity. In “Googling Myself” he finds several other poets who share his name, or a newscaster whose name is just similar enough that Google confuses the two and throws this man’s image into the lot. With a measure of intrigue and chagrin, Scheffler considers the paradox of being recognized:
and what a relief that is, to look
into the mirror of the internet after a haggard
sleepless night, or after an ordinary afternoon
of having no good ideas about life,
and to see him instead.
The inner turmoil that perniciously haunts the creative mind is revisited in “Ode to Running” in which Scheffler laments how, as a poet:
sometimes I don’t even like
poems;
or that his friend, a surgeon with his own demands, cannot possibly understand
what it’s
like to spend a year on a line.
What works so well in this book is when Scheffler requires the reader to look inward. His mastery of provoking emotive reactions is most rewarding when he crafts good-natured humor out of devastation, such as a poem like “Dear Florida” with its good-natured ribbing of that polarizing American state. You’ll find yourself chuckling and nodding, maybe even murmuring “mmmhmm” for good measure, all set up for more quips until bam! three poems later you encounter “School Shooting” and its parallelism will gut you.
These shifts in tone and content allow Scheffler’s work to shine. He concocts these ripe, extended metaphors that seem like a portentous warning of what we might risk missing if we don’t get ourselves off the assembly conveyor belt and witness. In “Five-Finger Discount” he writes:
We must try to be gentle, like the
white-naped cranes who fly a thousand
miles to winter between the
two Koreas, treading so lightly
they rarely set the landmines off.
Earnest and thought-provoking, Heartworm by Adam Scheffler delivers poems that soar off the page with a tender wit and an unbridled postulation, perfect for readers who desire eye-opening consciousness.
Robyn Earhart’s work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Columbia Journal, and the Under Review where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cole W. Williams
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cole W. Williams
I always like to start these interviews off by learning about the inspiration behind the writing. In “On Thelma & Louise”, your short essay published in Volume 25, you wrote about a woman who watches the 1991 film alone “to see if the screenplay actually mentions divorce.” How did this essay come to be?
Robyn, I appreciate you and your fantastic queries. During graduate school I wrote a series of essays revolving around divorce and separation as part of a full-length essay project titled On Leaving. The story of Thelma & Louise in pop culture is about two women who leave their quotidian patriarchies to seek freedom. How much freedom they could capture within the confines of the world as they know it, interests me. This story is a fantasy, Hollywoodized for effect (explosions, Brad, guns) but never scratching the realities of entanglement and duty. What would be the true rebellion of a single mother with children, co-parenting, working weekends and putting herself through school for example? There is none. That is what makes the movie so effective; it hits on a deep sonic chord for any of us who have a rebel heart.
You intentionally pause the reader to consider the film’s final scene. Like Thelma and Louise, the speaker also goes on a journey as her thinking shifts from the beginning of the essay to the end. I’m curious to know, how do you deal with roadblocks that might appear when the writing veers? What do you do to cull the floodgates of thoughts to help keep the essay on course?
To cull the floodgates! Best case scenario: I think about my writing for a long time before I write it. Usually. If I force myself to sit down when the sous chef hasn’t prepped up top then I will face a roadblock and the writing will veer off course; in which case I walk away and let it simmer longer. For example, another essay in the collection is written in dialogue which I know in my guts isn’t serving the piece, but I haven’t worked through a great alternative yet, so back to the subconscious it goes. I am willing to wait for the high-maintenance pieces to work themselves out. I’m not sure I’m a hold-back-the-cracking-dam type of a girl. More of a machete-wielding-anarchist: save the draft and then cut away the erroneous filler, extrapolations, and your revolving bridge words. For essays I try to stay strict to the thesis. It can get lyrical, but it has to answer to the crux at all times.
The essay has its own cinematic touches: the lyric “I”, the romanticized pining for Michael Madsen, and then there is a visual texture to the essay’s fragmented structure with its usage of all-caps and italics, slang. Do other creative mediums like film or theater often work their way into your writing?
I believe a writer comes into their true voice after writing many novels worth of material (maybe sooner for some?) and I believe we all must mimic and imitate until we get there. Plus these imitations create great writing when you can drop a line like this and like that and dedicate it to the well-deserved. For the longest time I thought to write essays I had to sound like Annie Dillard, which is great if you got that vibe, but I am actually funny in real life! Have you ever heard the advice to type out someone else’s entire novel? It makes sense if your dialogue is struggling. This statement may sound ridiculous but it’s true: Around the time of grad school, I decided to experiment with writing in my true voice instead of the preconceived elevation I thought some churring literary giant wanted out there in the Oz of my mind. (My true voice: swearing, hyperbole, making up words, abusing slang, impersonating, joking, and riffs.) And! On topics I gravitated to come hell or high water. One of those genres is pop culture, especially “bad” pop culture. T.V. and movies and pop songs—so I opened my hand and blew the geraniums goodbye…there was no wind that day and they blopped off my hand and landed on the ground right in front of me. The trick is, how to orchestrate a micro essay on Brit-Brit for the literary audience as opposed to sosh or a Post and I love that challenge.
Failure is the best.
Speaking of work that spans genres, you’ve published several picture and MG books. What is it like for you to work with an illustrator? How do you conceptualize your work creating the text in collaboration with images?
I love working with an illustrator. Ian Durneen (UK) and I have been making books together for some years now and the reason we keep going is because we have a true blast together. Laura Acosta (Buenos Aires, Argentina) was a wonder to work with. She illustrated Dr. Brainchild in 2018 which I shared annually, pre-Covid, at The Bakken Museum for children’s science and engineering events. Dr. Brainchild is entirely written in them/them pronouns, so my only request was for the character to be gender fluid with goggles, and she sent mock-ups of the character. The collaboration and vision building is the most exciting: feeling out how much independence the artist requires to hit that magic spot. Ian went nuts with the protists and scienced it up for Eukarya. Typically, I make vision boards and do light sketches and we work digitally together. I realize this is not the traditional mode of publishing picture books, but I truly love the processes of building a book, making those layers, and re-working to find a rhythm. Not everything works all the time, but I feel like it’s a misnomer to seek perfection. It’s a journey and how else does one learn other than doing?
You won the Under Review 2022 chapbook contest for The Pump, forthcoming this spring. What can you tell us about this book and your experience submitting it for publication?
The Pump is a prose piece inspired by the 1977 docudrama Pumping Iron featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno battling it out for glory at the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition in South Africa. I spent last summer going to bodybuilding competitions and writing about my gym. Being a fan of the Under Review with their sports slant—while always cool, always community-building events—I wanted to have something ready for them; also since reading their first chapbook release which I found to be a special piece; in writing and in execution as book art. After considering many different angles to this possibility I ended up landing on a type of ekphrastic take, very similar to “On Thelma & Louise” but attempting, in this case, a completely different narration, voice, and tone.
Who are some writers that inspire you? What are some books that you find yourself returning to and for what reasons?
I’ve been hitting that chapbook scene pretty hard lately; DIAGRAM and Red Hen Press. I like this form and the concision it begets. I also have been keeping up with American Chordata, Northwest Review, science journals, strange things from book sales, random news as well as my favorite online journals like The Night Heron Barks. For books, I have a “Read Now” pile, “Read Next For Real,” “Third Up” etc.
Here are some books and authors I return to (not including obscure science books on quarks and neutrinos): Jill Osier for brevity and holding back; Reginald Dwayne Betts for the study of Truth and biography; Eula Biss for perspective; Wendy S. Walters for hybrid essays; Marjorie Perloff to get schooled; Amit Majmudar for music and humor; Diane Seuss, Eduardo C. Corral, Claudia Rankine (schooled); Solmaz Sharif for perspective; C.D. Wright for investigations; Brian Doyle for humor in essays; Mark Bibbins for epic poetry; Michael Wasson; Jim Harrison; Bill Weigl; my mentors; Rose Metal Press; the dictionary; CMS; I’ve read Fugitive Atlas and Whereas a few times each now, John D’Agata, huge fan of Kaveh Akbar and Franny Choi. Does anyone want to send me fiction recs? Lol.
What projects are you working on now?
More essays on the world exploding, science, divorce, and hippos. I’m deep in the throes of a long, drawn-out conversation with the ghost of the previous owner of my house. We are not quite on a first name basis. This is more like a collection of aphorisms, think 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso. When the house is left with all her stuff how can you not drink her rum and build a fire?
Cole W. Williams is a poet, essayist, and hybrid writer. Recent works are featured in North Dakota Quarterly, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, FERAL, Eastern Iowa Review, Xinachtli Journal, and other journals. Williams read off site at AWP ‘22 with The Night Heron Barks. Her piece “The Godwin Essay” was recognized by the 2021 International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Creators of Justice Literary Award 2021. Williams attended the 2022 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference within the poetry cohort.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Eva Song Margolis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Eva Song Margolis
The illustration credit belongs to Dain Suh, courtesy of NPR. Dain Suh is a New York-based art director, illustrator, and digital content creator. You can learn more about Suh’s work via their website.
Your poem “A Pantoum for Family” that was published in Volume 25 examines how we talk about transnational adoptions of children. What was the impetus behind your poem? How did it come to be?
While participating in the Loft Mentorship Series last year, I learned about pantoums from one of our mentors, Chris Santiago. I had not worked in form much or fully understood how they can be used, so that experience was especially important.
“A Pantoum for Family” is the first pantoum I wrote. It started as a very different poem. I was exploring the possibilities of who my Korean mother, my first mother might be; I was holding these different and sometimes divergent things that have been revealed to me over the decades. I thought the pantoum was perfect for telling a story about fragmentation, for creating something whole from bits and pieces, woven across time, space, speakers. Those bits and pieces about my mother have been revealed in part by assumption and part reality, part in dream and desire, and part in record (however fabricated) that justify the reason for all of this unknowing in the first place.
As I worked on the poem, it seemed there was a lot of space to get creative with all the fragments and present them in an unconstrained way. Realizing this, at the time, a pantoum didn’t feel like the right form to explore my mother. Instead, I felt inclined to use pantoum for a topic that requires some rigidity, structure, something that conveys a need for control and process. The mainstream adoption narrative then seemed to be a more fitting topic. The adoption narrative requires certain assumptions-made-reality to be told repeatedly, to make everyone involved believe without question, lest the whole house of cards come crashing down.
By the end of the poem, by letting go of the pantoum form, I wanted to convey an unraveling and eventual abandonment of that narrative. I hoped to imply a sort of chaos that brings deeper understanding and creates space for questions. Although we might be led to believe otherwise, mainstream discourse about adoption is not opposite or unrelated to mainstream narratives about immigration, colonization, or capitalism for example.
If we know that memories can be altered by how we tell our stories, how do you think we can write our own stories authentically if what we’ve been told is only shared from one perspective? Do you have advice to share with aspiring writers who are working to tell their own origin stories?
When what we’ve been told about ourselves is shared only from a single perspective, and when we sense an investment in maintaining that perspective, then we can begin to see the cracks. I think my advice would be to allow yourself to seep into the crevices. (If you’ve already been taught to be malleable, perhaps this seeping will flow with ease.) Get to know how the cracks feel, sound, and taste. Sit with what they desire and fear, and question how that has or hasn’t shaped you. Is this my origin story or someone else’s? Question if the speaker of those stories still believes their own words—is there any internal conflict? How have you been asked to hold this conflict for them? Has this holding decentered your own desires, fears, senses?
Can you share with us a little bit about your process for incorporating lines from Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s “Poem for the Adopted Child” into your poem? What was your process for folding Heyliger’s lines into your own so it would feel seamless to the reader? Sometimes using another’s words among our own can create a type of scenario where the writing feels rigid or forced. Did you run into something like this, and if so, how did you continue moving forward? How did you know that using Heyliger’s work would further your own?
I decided to insert Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s poem after I finished the first draft. I wanted to create another layer and reinforce the speaker’s voice. “Poem for the Adopted Child” is true to the traditional adoption narrative; it speaks for the child and speaks from the adoptive parents’ perspective. I was curious about how that poem would perform differently when its lines were taken from their original context and placed somewhere new—an adoption of sorts. Even though Fleur Conkling Heyliger’s poem and the speaker in “A Pantoum for Family” come from the same perspective, I wanted to create conflict and discordance when the two voices are mashed together.
Who are some writers that you’re currently enjoying? Do you have writers or books that you return to for any reasons? 
I’m currently reading Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, which feels like an ancestral gift. I’m also slowing reading Concealed Words (숨겨둔 말) by Sin Yong-Mok and translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, whose works are also in Volume 25! Two books that I’ve recently been coming back to are Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman.
What projects are you working on now?
My current goal is to prepare a manuscript for publication. I have themes and ideas in place in terms of how I’d like to structure it. I need to write more and then I’d love to work with a mentor who can provide feedback and guidance on how to refine and select poems to ensure they are presented adequately for a collection.
Eva Song Margolis’s poems frequently explore identity, kinship, and loss. She is interested in deconstructing ideologies and structures to question what liberation and justice could look like. Margolis’s accomplishments include being named a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series fellow, an Inroads Mentor fellow, and an Intermedia Arts Beyond the Pure recipient. Her work appears in Moonroutes, MOONFRUIT, and Unmargin.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Annie Trinh
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Annie Trinh
Your short story “Observation Notes on the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia” from Volume 25 is about an entomologist battling an infestation of killer hornets in Seattle. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
First, I just want to say thank you for interviewing me and giving a home to “Observation Notes on the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia.” I was really excited when the piece finally found a home in your journal, and as for how the story came to be—there are so many reasons. I wrote this story during my last year of my MFA at the University of Kansas, and it was during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it wasn’t the first draft. The original piece was longer, the focus was immensely different, and it took place in the fall of 2019. It was also a frustrating piece too because I felt like it wasn’t going anywhere, so I put it away for a couple of months before I revised it again. The inspiration to write about killer hornets happened when I was reading the news about the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of it. Like everyone, I just wanted to know how as a country we were dealing with it and the spread of it. Then I came across an article about how Washington State found a large number of Asian Giant Hornets and it could pose a problem to the surrounding lands. And my first reaction was ‘Oh, no, I hope this doesn’t increase the number of anti-Asian hate crimes.’ Then the story came alive after that.
The heart of this story is the amplification of anti-Asian hate crimes, and it feels similar to what has continued to occur in real life in the US since the outbreak of Covid-19. The narrator says she feels safer wearing her lab suit because she fears being attacked not by hornets, but by people: “Maybe because the suits make me blend in with everyone else. I don’t have to worry about people attacking me when they see my face.” What is attractive to you about writing real life into fiction? Do you feel there is something about the genre that allows writers and readers to process real life differently?
What attracts me to writing real life in fiction is that it lets me see nuance in situations that I haven’t seen before. It kind of reminds me of the saying “write what you know.” I remember taking that literally—that you need to write everything that you know and only that. I also know that some writers are against it too; however, I take more of an abstract approach to that now. To me, it is more about finding the nuance in truths. So, to me it is to write what you know, write what you don’t know, and write what you need to know or to understand.
When I was at Mississippi State University one of my classmates asked a visiting professor about writing real life into fiction because she based it on her own personal life too much. He answered that the personal experience that you are writing into the story are events, but the fiction lies in the character development, the actions, and how they approach the situation. I would also add to this statement that it is the same for the reverse. I think that quote that you’ve pointed out is a great example of that and why the genre lets writers and readers process real life differently—it helps us understand our reality better. When I wrote that statement, it was not only referring to the anti-Asian hate crimes, but also experiences from other marginalized communities too. My experience as an Asian American will always be different from another person of color. I might not understand all of these experiences; however, I do experience macro and microaggressions and I use those emotions to write my stories when I put my characters into different situations. The events are not real, but the emotions are the truth, and it allows me to explore situations that I haven’t been in before and understand better. Then when I do face reality, I have a better understanding and perspective about the world.
Continuing from that previous question, something that I really love about your story is its fluid form; many times while reading it, I had to stop myself and ask if what I was reading was fiction or nonfiction. Can you talk to us about your process for blending fact and fiction, and your choice for structuring the story into segments?
That is an excellent question. In order for me to explain that I will need to start with the fiction and then go to the facts. These are things I know not to be true in the story: 1) hornets don’t grow up to a size of a bird (maybe); 2) an infestation that can cover a whole city can’t happen (maybe); 3) there is no way the U.S. would use DDT to kill an infestation at that level (maybe); and 4) people would really attack a lab just to get anti-hornet suits (maybe).
As you can see, I said “maybe” at the end of each statement, and here is why: 1) there are bugs that can reach the size of a bird or larger (check out the atlas moth; really cool, but scary); 2) infestations do happen, but more on a microlevel such as a hornet’s nest overtaking a house; 3) the U.S. still uses pesticides in crops today even if they are not at the same level as DDT; and 4) I think COVID has showed us that people do attack for various reasons. Each fiction that I have presented is very close to an actual event that happened—and that is how I usually blend it. It’s kind of like creating a thesis statement: the facts need to support the fiction. For example, if I wrote about hornets attacking the city, and then people become zombies—can that stand? It can stand, but that will require a lot of world building—and that is the key there. The facts that I have chosen don’t require an explanation because the readers are familiar with an event that is close to it.
In my original draft, the story actually had multiple points of views and multiple characters. It took me fifty drafts to find the structure of the story. I went from vignettes to diary entries to a typical narrative structure—nothing worked. It also didn’t help that the story was 5,000 words long too and it was unfocused. However, I started to realize that segments or a list story might be the best format for the narrative, especially since it is in a point of view of a scientist, and they had to be unbiased. Even with the realization, I had to figure out how long it was going to be and what I would focus on. That all became clearer once I read Lily Hoang’s “13 Remotely Related to South Bend, Indiana.” I love that piece because it centers on place as a character and what she was witnessing when she lived there; basically the facts were presented as segments. After that, I decided to do that in a similar fashion. I narrowed the perspective to one character and presented what she saw while working as an entomologist.
Your narrator is a complex character. What dialogue we get from her—both external and internalized thoughts—are bereft of emotion. Yet she works in a field with wide gender and racial disparities, she endures macroaggressions on egregious levels, and she climbs trees setting bait traps like it’s no big deal. This woman is a powerhouse! What was she like in draft versions? What was your intention with not naming her?
Those are great questions, and yes—she lacks emotions. It was a critique that I often got when I workshopped this story or submitted it to literary journals. The funny thing is that, in the earlier drafts, she had emotions. The reader saw both of her external and internalized thoughts. There was more of a sense of urgency from her in those earlier drafts; however, I took it out because the story became unfocused. I’m not saying emotions are not important—they totally are, but the story needed to focus on the surroundings and what she is observing during her job. We have to remember that she is a scientist—an entomologist that is doing her job to prevent an infestation of murder hornets. Like in every job, you want to separate your personal life from your job because that is how you get things done. Not only that, but she is also writing observational notes too, and those need to be unbiased as they can be. Most importantly, the lack of emotions made her a witness to all of the hate crimes that are happening within her community. Regardless of if there is a pandemic, infestation of bugs, or not—a lot of marginalized communities encounter these types of aggressions in their everyday lives and sometimes they just have to bear with it. For her not to have a reaction shows that these types of actions are normalized in her everyday life.
The lack of naming is important in this piece, but there is also the lack of information about the character in general. The only thing we know about her is that she is an entomologist and trying to prevent an infestation of murder hornets. We don’t know about her race, her family, or how she feels about the hate crimes happening within her own community. When she does, it doesn’t even add more clarity, just questions. She can be any person who is identified as Asian or part of a marginalized community. That’s why I didn’t give her a name. Yet, the lack of names for the main character has more of a darker meaning to it too. Within the story, people are performing these macroaggressions because they associate the name “Asian Murder Hornets” to Asian people. To us, we see her as an individual, a person who is trying to do her job, but to the people around her—she is just another person with Asian features; therefore, might be the cause of what is happening. However, it is more complicated than that because she is a scientist with all of this knowledge and doesn’t know what to do with it since people, in this story, don’t trust the scientists. Then what do you do when you have all of this information that could help, and people still don’t believe you? Basically, it is an erasure of your identity in the sense of race but in the world of one’s career.
Your story highlights the harmful legacy of spraying pesticides widely, in this case DDT. I’m very curious about the many paths of inquiry this recurring point in the story brings up, specifically pertaining to stubborn ignorance and blasé denial, about human consequence on the natural world. I’m wondering if you can talk with us about this. Why was it necessary for you to write this into “Observations…?” Do you often incorporate elements of science into your writing?
The funny thing is that I actually have a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, so science has been part of my identity since I was young. I still have a fondness for it even though I stopped continuing it, so to me science is like oxygen. I use it in everything I write. The science that I write is not heavy science, but it centers more on the ethics and consequences if one is not careful which is the reason why I wrote this story. This leads me to think of the quote “What is more precious than life?” The Earth, this land is the only home that we have, and we need to protect it. This is probably based on my own upbringing too. My parents are refugees from the Vietnam War, and they always taught me that my home and life is precious. If it is so important, then why don’t we do our very best to protect it? I think this came about when I was teaching an English composition class on visual analysis and one of the ads that I presented to my students had an endangered species ( I can’t remember, but I believe it was a type of whale), and it was wearing a mask of a panda—asking the audience, “Do you care now?” And then it made me realize, do we only care about the natural world if there is some value to us? For example, do we protect bald eagles because they are majestic birds and they are important to the environment, or is it because they have value to us as a nation and what it symbolizes? Then this leads me to think about the use of agent orange in Vietnam and in other countries, DDT and its effects on animals, and other chemicals that are used in warfare and displaced communities. We do this to benefit us—not the other way around.
This leads to another reason why I wrote it. In the story, there is a reference to space and how humans as a society have made leaps and bounds to understand the world beyond the Earth, but yet, we struggle understanding our own planet. Yes, the Earth changes constantly, so it is hard, but I don’t think that is a good excuse not to put in more effort into it. As humans, we need to understand how we can benefit and help the ecosystem around us (just like every other animal does) because if we don’t, it will be similar to what we saw with the pandemic, probably even worse. Therefore, it goes back to the question, “What is more precious than life?” If we as humans can’t even do that with each other, then how can we do that with the only home we live in? And that is really concerning.
Who are some writers you’re reading right now?
I am reading two books right now. One is by Paisley Rekdal’s The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. Because she is a poet, I really enjoy how she is using language and images in her nonfiction work. I admire writers who can write in different genres seamlessly, especially when the writer is playing with words. Plus, her work centers on identity and the relationship between her mom, and I also center my works on familial relations too.
The second writer I am reading is Max Porter. One of my friends recommended his novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers: A Novel, because I wanted to explore grief and how an individual confronts it. I love how he plays with multiple points of view and structure. One of my favorite characters is the crow, and Porter has an amazing talent in writing from an animal’s point of view.
You received a Steinbeck fellowship at San Jose State University in 2022. What projects are you working on?
Currently, I am working on my short story collection that “Observation Notes of the Effects of the Vespa Mandarinia” is part of. The collection centers on women’s bodies, magical realism, and retelling of Vietnamese fairy tales. I hope to finish this collection in a year or two, but knowing myself and how I am such a perfectionist, it will take longer. Another project that I am also currently working on is a novel that takes place after the Fall of Saigon and the boat people. I am at the research and outlining stage right now, but I am planning by the end of this year to start on a draft soon.
Annie Trinh is a writer from Nevada and has earned her MFA from the University of Kansas. Supported by Key West Literary Seminar, VONA, and Kundiman, her work has been published or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Passages North, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is currently a 2022-23 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.