#foundry journal

2018 & belated updates

I spent this winter thinking back on the troubling year--the constant hum of anxiety and my unhealthy defense mechanisms. I want this next year to be a turn: I want to reclaim my daily rhythms and textures, my experiments, my internal and external motionings. To that end, I'm concocting various intentions and plans, small things such as take more walks or learn to embroider, and bigger ones, too. I am intending to be a tiny bit more confident with book matters this time around. I am intending to give more space to my triumphs (rather than to give all the space to my shortcomings). I am intending to seek/build meaningful community by being less afraid. I am intending to resist paralysis/inertia/staying silent/dehumanizing infrastructures. I will probably largely fall short at all this, but I also trust that I will make tiny steps. So much of 2017 was spent in murky, chaotic anxieties (my panic attacks resurged), but I hope this year I can attempt to gather the threads of my inner life once again.

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In writing news, I still managed to publish work in 2017 from my forthcoming book. Chen Chen reached out to me for the National Poetry Month issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, where he also interviewed me on the negative space between things and using untranslated language. The editor of Tupelo Quarterly, where I've published before, also reached out. A couple poems made it into the Asian American publication Hyphen.

Foundry nominated a piece for the Pushcart Prize. The Adroit Journal nominated a piece for Best Small Fictions.