Beth Nguyen’s essay “Apparent,” on her absent mother and piecing together a fractured past, appears in our Spring issue. 

Family photograph (©Beth Nguyen)

I have no pictures of myself as a baby. I was born in Saigon during a war, and was eight months old when my family became refugees; my memories begin in a worn-down house in a deeply conservative town in Michigan, where we were resettled.

Photographs were expensive then, so we had few of them. The Polaroid colors are muted and mottled, an expression of what it felt like to grow up in a Vietnamese refugee family surrounded by whiteness. It has taken my entire life to understand the beginnings of this awareness. It began with watching my father go to work at a feather factory and come home with down in his hair. My uncles, who shared the house with us, worked different shifts at different factories. They saved money to buy records. My grandmother Noi took care of me and my sister. She knitted us ponchos out of marled yarn, let us wear fuzzy pink slippers into the snow.

I didn’t know what it meant to be a refugee, but I knew we were different because on TV shows everyone else spoke another language. My sister and I learned English this way. I don’t remember wondering where my mother was or realizing she was still in Viet Nam. I didn’t even know what a mother was until I was told. My grandmother would give whole apples and pears to my sister and me, knowing that we would save them. We were always waiting for someone to come home.

All family pictures create a chronology. But I realize only now that the pictures we took and kept were a space just for us. White people determined so much about our lives—jobs, schools, language—but not in these photos. In these images we seem to be in our own world, alone together. It’s such a short time. By the last picture, it’s over. Read More

To showcase the variety of the short stories published in the Spring issue, we asked the six writers to select a single sentence that marked the moment they first knew what story they were writing. All but one played ball: Jesse Ball could not choose one. Luckily for Jesse, Andrew Martin highlighted two sentences. Read on for discussions of narrative slipperiness, places of disjuncture, and happy things.

This story was stuck in my head for months, so by the time I started writing it, I felt like I knew more about it than anyone needs to know about anything. Drafting is often a sweaty, anxious process for me, but there are always surprises that make it worthwhile. I wanted the story to have a slippery quality to it, but nailing down the narrative voice was a series of small discoveries. Writing the opening, and writing this sentence in particular, is maybe the moment when the story and its somewhat capricious voice slid into proper focus for me. —Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead”  Read More

To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue, which hits newsstands today, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story:

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, c. 1851

I don’t know if “evokes” is exactly the right word for this painting, but I thought a lot about Ophelia by John Everett Millais and the mythology of dead women in art and fiction. To some extent, I felt like I was writing in the opposite direction of this painting. It loomed in my brain all the same.

—Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead”

Kate Elizabeth Fowler, Untitled, Family Photographs, 2019

A pure baby shining in white at the center of the frame, being held by a shirtless, barefoot boy. Something about it all is so sacred. I believe my main character in “An Unspoken,” Clara Parker, would have seen this in a dream and felt happy, or could just as easily been haunted by it. And this is everything the story truly hinges on.

—Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, “An Unspoken”

This is a photograph of the Angel Makers of Nagyrév, a group of Hungarian women who killed many men in their village. I believe this was taken after their eventual arrest. My story was very loosely inspired by theirs.

—Rebecca Makkai, “A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons”

Vasily Vereshchagin, A Resting Place of Prisoners, 1878-1879

This painting by Vasily Vereshchagin, painted from 1878–79, depicts (according to the Brooklyn Museum where it hangs) Turkish war prisoners freezing to death while being marched to Russian war camps during the Russo-Turkish War. I can imagine the characters in my story going to see this painting while in the midst of their War and Peace reading group and drawing comparisons between Vereshchagin’s project and Tolstoy’s, their various attempts to bring the reality of Russian history home to their audiences. The characters might have wondered, like I do, whether Tolstoy saw this painting, and what he thought of it. Guessing he would have hated it, but maybe he wasn’t in that phase of his life yet.

—Andrew Martin, “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth”

Lord Kitchener as a baby on his mother’s lap, with his elder brother and his sister. (published 1916 in The Illustrated War News)

This photograph does not evoke the story for me. But there is something in it. That the man who would go on to be the origin of such immense butchery–the famous British hero Kitchener–can rest this way on his mother’s lap. We go from here to there—from there to here, or do we? What is a person?

—Jesse Ball, “Diary of a Country Mouse”

Edvard Munch, Melancholy II, 1898

This 1898 woodcut, “Melancholy II,” by Edvard Munch. The landscape is a little abstract, but I think the woman is sitting beside the water. The coastline looks like a creature, doesn’t it? I love, especially, that you can’t quite tell where the horizon is.

—Clare Sestanovich, “By Design”

Keep exploring our Spring issue here

Jeffrey Yang. Author photo: Nina Subin.

On an overcast Friday this January, I rode the Metro-North up along the Hudson to meet Jeffrey Yang at Dia:Beacon. Yang’s wife is an educator there, and the couple has lived in the town of Beacon, New York, for the past fifteen years. His poem in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, “Ancestors,” centers around an exhibition at a gallery in Seoul, South Korea, and the piece made me curious about his work as it overlaps with visual art. When I asked Yang if he might show me one or two of his favorites at Dia before we sat down to talk, my request was met tenfold. We embarked on a comprehensive tour: Dorothea Rockburne’s complex mathematical concepts alchemized through abstract, geometric installations; Richard Serra’s heavy, leaning sculptures of steel; the minimalist reimagining of a book of hours by On Kawara (about whom Yang recently wrote here). The pieces that he found exciting were as aesthetically diverse as his poetry.

The world of a Jeffrey Yang poem is eclectically populated. His abecedarian debut collection, An Aquarium, is a taxonomy of aquatic life that incorporates characters from Aristotle to Emperor Ingyo. His most recent collection, Hey, Marfa, takes the Texas city (coincidentally home to Donald Judd, Dia:Beacon darling) as its subject, and examines the strange, transient nature of its history alongside paintings and preparatory drawings by Rackstraw Downes. In between, he edited the collection Birds, Beasts, and Seas, a seventy-fifth-anniversary tome of poetry from the New Directions archives, and he has translated work by Liu Xiaobo, Su Shi, and Ahmatjan Osman.

Yang is warm and familiar. For every insight into a piece we were looking at, he had a humorous anecdote about Dia:Beacon—he was serious about art without solemnity. After our conversation, he walked with me to town to pick up a sandwich and then saw me and my lunch onto the train. In his career and his process, Yang has pursued his interests without expectation, with the simple faith that they will lead him where he is meant to be going. To all accounts, they have.

INTERVIEWER

What were your first forays into poetry like?

YANG

I probably started with Chinese poetry, because both my sister and I went to a Chinese school on Saturdays, and we were required to memorize and recite poems. I remember having some children’s poetry anthologies, too, and enjoying the rhythm and the music of those poems.

At the University of California, San Diego, there was a pretty experimental literature department. I took one of my first writing classes with Carla Harryman, who was visiting. Melvyn Freilicher, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, Wai-lim Yip, Jerome Rothenberg, Quincy Troupe, all taught there. Amiri Baraka also taught as a visiting writer. They were all involved in a more avant-garde idea of poetry in different ways. I remember reading the anthology Premonitions, published by this press called Kaya, an Asian American press, which was eye-opening for me.  I hadn’t heard of most of the poets in that book, and it all felt fresh to me, how they were really pushing the language. It included some of Theresa Cha’s work, which was also performative and visual. I was curious.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know early on that you wanted to be a poet? Did you conceive of yourself as a poet?

Read More

In Jonathan Escoffery’s story, “Under the Ackee Tree,” which appears in our Summer 2019 issue, the protagonist, homesick for Jamaica, attempts to grow an ackee tree in his Miami backyard. No amount of water or fertilizer will make the seeds sprout. After Hurricane Gilbert devastates the Caribbean, and all the phone lines back home go out, the protagonist sits his sons down at breakfast to:

try teach them them culture to make sure it survive. The tropical market on Colonial start carry canned ackee and green banana and salt cod, so you cook the boys ackee and saltfish and try explain why it Jamaica’ national dish. You see this here, you say. The ackee grow in a pod and it must open on it own or else the ackee poison you. You point to the picture on the can, so them can see how it grow, and it remind you that you never eat ackee out of no can before.

This summer, we mailed Escoffery three varieties of canned ackee (the only kind of ackee available in the U.S.) and asked him to conduct a taste test. 

If you’ve ever spent time in Jamaica, you’ve likely had the opportunity to sample the island’s national dish, ackee and saltfish. Typically served at breakfast time, the ackee fruit is lightly boiled and paired with dehydrated salted cod, an assortment of onions and peppers, including scotch bonnet, and rounded out with sides of boiled green banana, dumplings (or spinners as they’re called in Jamaica), and johnnycakes. If you order ackee and saltfish over the counter at a restaurant in Brooklyn or Hartford or Miami, these sides will likely be referred to simply as food, as in, You wan’ food wit’ that? If asked this question, avoid dwelling on the confusion of being asked if you want food with your food, and say yes. The mild sweetness of the green banana and dumplings balances out the cod’s saltiness, and the result is pure magic in your mouth. If you’re interested in cooking the dish at home, it’s relatively simple to prepare once you’ve sourced the ingredients, except for one thing: get it wrong and it will kill you. Read More