Entries from December 2008

December 31, 2008

December 30th, 2008

In an Asian market in San Mateo, my mother, sister and I stand and get a short talk about American Ginseng from a nervous young Chinese American woman. Beside her are plastic cups full of a pale yellow broth, and a hotpot with chicken, ginseng and seaweed stewing in it. As I wait for our [...]

December 26, 2008

On the Present Tense

ZILKA: You wrote Edinburgh not only in first person, but also in PRESENT TENSE. I was like, “Wow”–because present tense (like second person) is one of the toughest things to pull off in a long piece, like a novel. Were you conscious of this while writing? How did you come to the decision to write [...]

December 25, 2008

1 Thing About Marriage Equality

I live in a country where you can be straight and get married at the end of a game show after having met just a few weeks before, and be gay and know each other for 20 years and not be able to be married.

December 21, 2008

On The Pleasure of Imagining How It Would Be

As a student at the Bennington Summer Writers Workshop in my junior year of college, I remember hearing Blanche Boyd say, If you’re fiction is good enough, they’ll believe it all really happened to you, and if your nonfiction is good enough, they’ll believe you made it up. I think about this more than I [...]

December 15, 2008

Messenger Bag Contents Also A Guide To My Blog

My friend Jane made up a blog meme and then tagged me. She asked us to take everything out of our bags right when she emailed us, and to put the contents list on our blogs. The bag is a messenger bag, World-Map orange, goretex-lined, waterproof, bought at the Jack Spade store in New York [...]

December 7, 2008

I Am Either Where You Think I Am, Or, Not

It snowed this morning. It’s the first snow of the year. I woke up and there was the beautiful light off the snow in the kitchen as I came downstairs. I felt released from the fall. I took a break from updating for a while partly because the methods by which I’ve maintained this blog [...]

December 1, 2008

Irma Vep, The Next Generation

From Warren Ellis’s blog, the results of an open call to remake the character of Irma Vep. This one is my favorite, by an up and comer named Daniel Heard: