A Conversation with CURTIS CHIN
Author · Co-founder · Asian American Writers’ Workshop · NYC

I was born and raised in Detroit in the 80s. It was a tough time for my hometown because of crack and AIDS, but I think it made me a fighter. With my first memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, it was more of a collection of stories that I stitched together. I just started writing my favorite memories from childhood of growing up in my family’s Chinese restaurant.

A Conversation with Author SAMINA ALI

The reason there's 20-plus years between my two books is because I had massive brain trauma in the midst of writing my first book. This meant that when I went back to writing that book, the experience of writing was not so much about expressing my creativity but more about creating neural pathways. Creating pathways is such a painful process that I would be plagued by a headache minute into my writing. I'd write until I couldn't keep my eyes open against the pain. Then I'd simply swivel in my chair, away from the desk, and let my body fall to the ground. I'd lie there curled up in pain. In later years, whenever I thought about writing, I saw myself curled up in pain, lying on the ground next to my desk. I couldn't go back. For years, I stopped writing -- which is so sad because writing is what helped to rewire my brain when even the neurologists had given up on me. Writing had saved my life. But the trauma -- I just couldn't get through it. Finally, I realized that in order to write again, I had to get back down on the ground. I had to go through the trauma to get to the other side.... and so I did by writing this memoir. The through line might be about my brain recovery, but it's really a love letter to the art of writing. To words and creativity and art.

A Conversation with Author CIERA McELROY

Publishing my debut novel Atomic Family took about eight years — it began as an interconnected story cycle developed in an undergraduate writing workshop. I found the interconnected format very freeing for exploring character development and backstory. In that version, we followed the Porter family through various stages in their timeline. There were stories from the Great Depression when Dean and Nellie were children, stories from when they met and married, and then there was one story that changed everything. It was about a father and son building a fallout shelter together in the backyard. The father is a nuclear scientist. His son is obsessed with the threat of nuclear war and has fully bought into the duck-and-cover paranoia. The son asks his father, "What will happen to us if a bomb comes?" The father assures him their shelter would protect them. But of course he knows this is a lie. He believes that the shelter will provide a sense of security for his son. A semblance of a plan. Instead, it does the opposite and becomes a symbol of doom. I sensed pretty early on that I had been circling the central theme of the book. This was it. This was what I wanted to explore: how to live in an age of anxiety, how to protect those we love. In my MFA program at the University of Central Florida, I reworked the project into a circadian novel based on this story. It was a hot mess. Un-outlined. It felt like a monologue. After a workshop session led by Brenda Peynado, I shelved that version and re-wrote the novel completely from scratch and mostly from memory, this time using a careful outline. This process took a lot of rewriting, which I ultimately found very clarifying. It forced me to distill the story to its truest essence.

A Conversation with Author · Journalist · Social Worker EILENE ZIMMERMAN

My most well-known work is probably the story I wrote for The New York Times upon which my memoir Smacked is based, and that process was unique because it was almost a cathartic unloading and exploration (of addiction of loved ones) I needed and wanted to do. It was a pleasure to write that, because I needed to do it so badly. For the novel I'm now working on, I find that when I'm starting a new chapter and thinking about these characters I've been living with for a while now, it helps if I get out in nature and take a walk or a hike and just put myself in the character's shoes for a little while, think about what they are going to say, who they'll speak with, what they will do. And then I get home and jot down all those thoughts, and use those notes later to write the chapter.

A Conversation with Author MAX DELSOHN

I read a ton as a kid. My dad writes nonfiction books about sports, so it was important to him to read to all three of us at night when we were little. We were never wanting for books in our house. It's hard for me to remember specifics from when I was really, really young but I know he read the first Harry Potter book to me, and maybe the second one, then at some point I started reading them myself. I used to brag about how many times I had read each Harry Potter book. There were some YA books beyond Harry Potter that made a big impression, too: The Book Thief, the Maximum Ride series, basically anything by Meg Cabot, Looking for Alaska, Hoot, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

A Conversation with Author CHELSEA BIEKER

I think a lot about writing into my own personal fantasy. Fiction can offer us what we didn’t receive in real life. Whether that’s a conversation we’ve longed to have, or redemption where before there was none, or a sense of karmic justice—I like to think of my endings as doors opening rather than closing. I want there to be a sense of continuation and growth versus a conclusion. I’m a sap for miracles and for unlikely solutions and for saves at the final moment, and I like to play with that, knowing that in a story like my latest novel, Madwoman, there is no fairytale ending to be had, but there can be growth and turns of fate. While to me, the ending of Madwoman is ultimately hopeful, it still contains all the complication and brutality of everything that came before. But we get the sense of forward motion. Of connection versus separation.

A Conversation with Author JARED LEMUS

I was born in Queens, NY but lived most of my life--from the time I was about five--in Little Rock, AR, with intermittent stints in Guatemala. Because my parents were Visa-holders, it cemented the idea of porous borders in my mind. We would spend 8 months out of the year in the US and 4 months in Guatemala. That was my life. As I got older, though, I realized that things weren't as simple as they seemed and that the politics of "border-crossings" were more complicated than I had ever imagined. Because of this, my current collection blends America and Guatemala together: focusing on everyday people living their lives--either as part of the diaspora or back in Guatemala. I think it also opened my mind to reading literature from around the world instead of being so Anglo-centric and made me proud of being bilingual.