Poured Over: Jonathan Escoffery, Yiyun Li and Ling Ma on The Art of Fiction

Miwa Messer

“I start with the emotion. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know who the characters are necessarily. I’m working on very little like, I’m thinking, ‘oh, well, the way this light looks through a window’, or something— very few details here and there. But I don’t know what happens in this story.” Join 3 amazing authors talking about their 3 fabulous fall reads: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li and Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. The authors speak with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer, about the balance between humor and dread, how they start a project, some of their favorite writers and more.

Featured Books (Episode)

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

Severance by Ling Ma

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Moshin Hamid

Passing by Nella Larsen

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Moby Dick by Herman Mellville

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and we’re trying something new on the show today, because this September, we have three amazing, amazing books coming out. Two are short story collections, one is a novel. And I’m going to ask my three guests to introduce themselves by saying their name and the new book title. And then we’re gonna go from there. So I don’t know who wants to start?

Jonathan Escoffery

Well, my name is Jonathan Escoffery. And I am the author of If I Survive You,

Ling Ma

my name is Ling Ma. And I wrote the story collection Bliss Montage.

Yiyun Li

My name is Yiyun Li, and my new novel is called The Book of Goose.

You in the audience? Folks, you’ve heard all of these names, I’m sure. Jonathan just got a huge review in the New Yorker not long ago, Ling wrote a novel called Severance, which is one of the best zombie novels out there and zombies and late stage capitalism. And Yiyun has, let’s say, a MacArthur Genius Grant, Lannan literary Foundation award. I’m just really excited to see all of you. And we’re going to have just a big conversation about your current books, about craft, about being a writer in the world. And what I’d love to do to set this up, I just wanted people to get a chance to hear each of your voices so they know who’s speaking at any point in the show. But I want to talk for a second because Yiyun, you’ve also written short stories. So I just want to start with Jonathan and Ling, whichever, whoever wants to go first. Why start with stories?

In a way I came to the stories, which is a linked story collection, it’s all about the family. And there’s multiple ways to approach the question. One way that I tried to write a novel, and I kept failing to write that novel straight through, the characters kind of came out of a story that never even made it into the final version of the book. But I kept trying to write forward from that point and I decided at a certain point in my MFA program to just explore these characters through story, I kind of found my way to the stories in the actual book that way.

I had wanted to write a story collection during my MFA program, but Severance, which was the novel I had been working on kind of had more momentum, so I just went with that. I still feel like I’m starting out as a writer in many ways, and so stories, I wanted to use that space in this form, as a way to sort of experiment and play around with fiction, a lot more to play around with the form, I guess, and style and all of those things.

Okay. And Yiyun you’ve written a novel about two 13 year old girls in post World War Two, France.

Yes.

I love this book. I love the idea behind it. It was not what I was expecting. So can we just start with the shift? I mean, I’d heard you were working on more stories. And then I heard a novel was coming, and then suddenly we’re in France.

I think the post WWII France is partly just, you know, what captures my attention with children that age, you know, to my mind, it doesn’t matter that Agnés and Fabienne are French girls, they can be Chinese girls, they can be American girls, you know, if there’s some thing about children between age 12 and 14, I have not written extensively children characters. So I think this is a shift, it probably is not a geographical shift, it’s an age shift of my characters.

Jonathan, you are in Miami, it’s present day you’re writing about a family. That is, let’s call them Jamaican American. Yeah. You know, my mom and dad might have an issue with the American part. Let’s talk about Trelawny and his brother Delano for a second. And then we’ll get to mom and dad. But let’s talk about those two, Where’d they come from?

I really wanted to write about this kind of divide between generations, of the generation who actually emigrates to the US and the American born generation. And when I was writing the book, I wondered what would actually translate to a broader audience, because growing up in Miami, where, you know, it’s truly a city of immigrants. And I almost think like when people say they’re American, it almost is said in a different way because there’s an expectation from fellow immigrants and fellow second generation immigrants, that you are very much proudly wearing your heritage on your shoulder. And you know, and I wanted to think through like, what it’s like for the character who, in a sense, I’m thinking of Trelawny being feeling disinherited in a certain sense, you know, at a time he makes this attempt to become more Jamaican or he even dreams of marrying back into his Jamaican-ness and moving to Jamaica and making the US a distant bad memory as he sees it. And he’s not really able to accomplish that, you know, I guess I was interested in talking about immigration, but also talking about, we tend to think of it as it as though it goes in one direction and never looks back. And for, I know a lot of people who look back, and wonder, and there’s, you know, the stories, I know, my parents told me growing up that made me think, why did we ever come here then? And couldn’t we have avoided a lot of problems if we never did?

Trelawny is also a teenager when you start right? We meet him when he’s like, 14,15 years old, right?

He’s about nine, when we first meet him, but I think because at that age, you know, he has kind of limited agency. And he receives these questions that people are telling you what he is, or asking, What are you and he doesn’t have the answers. His parents, they found themselves in a new context, they don’t really know what it means to be Black in America or multiracial in America. And they don’t have the guidebook to give him and he has to kind of figure it out himself and he struggles to do so.

Okay, we’re coming back to that in a second. But I want to set Ling up for something because we’ve got to talk about the 100 boyfriends. The 100 boyfriends. So your current collection is wildly funny and goes in a lot of different directions. And you’ve got characters who are children, you’ve got characters who are young women, young men, and the 100 boyfriends in the giant house in Los Angeles. And so when you’re sitting down to put this collection together, because you’d started this after grad school, you said, So where did the collection start for you? I mean, did it start with a single story? Or did it start with the idea that you had a couple of projects lying around you thought, oh, I should put together a collection of stories because this is after your first novel.

So I wrote most of it during like pandemic year 2020. Many of the stories existed already as sort of some loose scenes or sketches. At the time, years before when I couldn’t finish them as stories, because time had passed, years had passed, I had some critical distance where I could allow the emotion of the story to unfurl the narrative, as opposed to completely overtaking it. So that’s often the challenge that I find with short stories that I don’t find maybe with a novel,

I want to talk about emotion for a second and the characters because, 13 year old girls, absolutely 13 year old girls anywhere who have emotions, lightly insane. And I say that having been a 13 year old girl, so all props, but Jonathan, we’ve got to talk about the men. We have to talk about your men for a second because emotion is something that they associate with being soft. And this is a huge pain point for Trelawny and his dad and even to a certain extent his older brother, who he should have more in common with than his pops.

Right. There’s the emotion that Trelawny has and there’s a story called Splashdown that features Trelawny’s cousin Cookie, and Cookie is trying to figure out, he’s met his father for the first time when he’s 13. And he’s trying to figure out what kind of man his father is and what kind of man would abandon his child basically, right after he’s born. Trelawny and Cookie, I think they’re, they’re both trying to be better men than their fathers or their fathers as they have come to understand them. I’m interested in exploring some of those expectations. So where the book is following a lot of his journey to understand how he can fit within the family, but also not bend himself into this thing that is largely harmful to other people that you know, that thing being that idea of, you know, maleness or masculinity, or he’s skeptical of fathers in general, for what it is that they tend to pass down.

Yiyun, there are basically no parents, or parental figures in The Book of Goose, But this is a parentless book, which I thought was an interesting, stylistic choice. And it makes perfect sense for the moment in history. But can we talk about how you got there? Because I think it was a deliberate choice on your part, to keep the adults out of the room.

I know, just like those Peanuts strips right? You hear the adults, you hear the teachers, you hear the parents. You only see the children. It’s interesting because I was teaching a workshop, my undergrads, I actually asked the same question. I said, a bunch of kids, where are the parents and my students sent an email, no offense professor, you know, children don’t like their parents to be around, which is very fair. So but I think for this book, because the two girls, you know, grew up together in the countryside, and it was already you know, the parents were, you know, living in poverty busy with their own lives, it’s almost like parents don’t, at the time, they don’t interfere with children’s lives, sort of the parents lives and children’s lives just touch, but they barely touch. And I think that’s special for my, the two girls, because they grew up happily as sort of their self made orphans in their self made world. And I think it’s history specific, but you often see children that age, they really can make an entire world out of their imagination and their own game. So I’m glad you pointed out, it’s a of parentless book, and too, Agnès goes to the English boarding school where the biggest parent, a parental figure, you know, a boarding school mistress, was just a terrible mother, right?

She really is the worst, but there has to be some fun for you writing a character like that headmistress who kind of is just awful. I mean, there’s a freedom in just being able to let her be who she is going to be. I mean, she’s trying to control this kid. She’s trying to control the story of her school. For you as the writer though, I mean, you weren’t having a little bit of fun with this character.

Yes. Also, I think it just happens. She also sort of steps in as old adults in the book, you know, the two girls together they come up with the idea of writing a book, it’s almost a literary hoax. But you know, anytime a hoax exists, it means someone is going to gain something from it. And it’s not the girls, it’s the grown ups. It’s the adults in the book, and Mrs. Thompson gains the most from this hoax. So you know, there’s something very pure about the two girls, they’re just going to make games, they’re going to have their fun. The purity always, you know, is disrupted or tainted once the adults come into the, into the stories. It’s really an anti-adult novel.

I have to say, I was having fun with the girls sort of watching what they would do. And every time they sort of bumped into one of these walls that an adult threw up, I was like, oh, because dread is something that the three of you do really well. And by dread, I mean, this is a compliment, I hope something comes off as a compliment. There is a sense of foreboding in some of these stories, certainly Ling, with you to a great extent, the dread always turns into something a little surprising, because of the way all three of you use humor. All three of you tend to sort of zig when I think you’re about to zag, or you know, and that’s based on different reading experiences and whatnot. But can we talk about how you use humor all of you and how you can actually subvert some of that sense of dread?

I guess, maybe humor has something to do with subverting expectations. And often I think about one way to subvert expectations is like to understand what in terms of like genre expectations to understand how the narrative is supposed to set up to go and then kind of maybe going around it or going a different way.

I think humor is is one of the hardest things to discuss, just because, you know, where does it come from? I think Ling was spot on in terms of kind of understanding what the anticipation is in the first place, so that you can kind of veer in a different direction and really catch readers off guard. I know for my characters, I’m writing about them in their kind of most desperate circumstances or moments and I know at times when I’ve felt the weight of the world and felt kind of limited hope to put it that way. When I felt at the mercy of power structures or when I felt things, challenges were insurmountable, for me, I needed that humor as a kind of coping mechanism communicating to my fellow poor coworkers, when we worked warehouse jobs or when we were trying to not respond in a way that would get us fired to our kind of jerk supervisors. You know, humor was the thing that saved us and kept us from in a sense just destroying ourselves or putting ourselves in situations that would destroy everything that we, you know, what little we had, I like to put that on the page so because that’s just what I think my characters would do in a sense, I think when the power dynamic is skewed so much against them like what else can they do but you’ll find the humor of the moments. Or even in a sense of it can deflect to because sometimes I think about Trelawny, we spent some time with him where he is living out of his vehicle and he has very material concerns and concerns about what he’s going to eat on a given day and just trying to get gas money to be able to move this vehicle and sometimes the absurd questions that these minor characters have for him that he could spend time engaging with, or he can play it off with a joke so he can continue to try to move towards that more immediate necessity. I don’t know, I think that’s how some of us have to move through the world, sometimes.

I think maybe it’s a little bit challenging for me to discuss humor as an isolated characteristic of fiction, in part because it needs to exist along some other things like when you’re cooking, acid has to cut fat. So for instance, one of my favorite stand up sets is Richard Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip”, which is from I think, the 80s. I taught it to undergrads for a few years there, what I really like about that set is that the humor is able to exist with many other things, it’s able to exist with sort of agony, with depression, with surprise with many of these other emotions, especially when he’s talking about the fire incident at the I think in the last 15 minutes of the set. The humor is amplified, I think, in a way because it exists among so many other things.

For me, humor often accompanies suspense, you know, I think suspense seems to me, when you said the dread for the characters, that dread is, you know, at least in my books to children don’t know where they’re going. We the readers, we know one of them is going to die. We know the other one is going to be forever lonely, but they are living in this bubble of suspense. They’re just moving forward blindly, right? And also blithely in this very, I feel that suspense oftentimes gives space for humor and also as what Jonathan and Ling said, just to subvert the anticipation.

I think it’s really important. So here’s a question for all three of you. When you’re starting on a project, whether it’s a story, whether it’s a novel, and I think this is going to weight a little differently, depending on short story versus novel. Are you starting with character? Are you starting with language? Are you starting with story? Are you starting with the idea of the thing, what comes first?

I think I start with emotion. And I’m trying to sort of chase down an emotion and trying to capture it, but not contain it so much that I’m suffocating it. For a while, I used to work as a journalist, sort of a freelance journalist in my 20s, very brief period of time, but it’s interesting because trying to write like a magazine feature or something, you know what the story is, you know, the events that have already happened. Now you try to as a second step, put the emotion into it, what the characters felt. And with fiction, it’s like the reverse, I start with the emotion. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know who the characters are necessarily. I’m working on very little like, I’m thinking, Oh, well, the way this light looks through a window, or something, very few details here and there. But I don’t know, what happens in this story.

Absolutely. I agree. I think, you know, I do start with characters, but mostly because I don’t know them. It’s not that I know the character. I don’t know, the characters. I don’t know their stories. But I have questions about these characters, it’s the same for novels and short stories, you know, I mean, I have two girls, but why? Why do they want to become writers? Why does one of them want to sign a name, the other one doesn’t want to? I think it’s almost like you don’t have the story. But you have a situation that you need to write through the situation to find the story. But I do agree, I think that’s exactly the opposite of what journalism does, right? That starts with the end of the stories. So I think novels, I guess, fiction starts with the beginning of the story.

In some cases, I think of the end of the story first. And so I want to, I may have a just a final image that I’m kind of working to, and that image is packed with emotion. And I think that’s a really important part. Sometimes I really need to work backwards from that image and think about what would be the compelling opening that suggests a kind of pivot and a kind of movement towards that final image and thinking about how to earn that journey, in a compelling way for readers, obviously, but for, you know, thinking about whatever it is that the character is going through, trying to back us up in time to the latest possible moment where we’ll understand this person is entering a kind of crisis moment that I want to see play out in some way. I think there’s just so many different ways. It’s a story.

So you’re starting with the endpoint. Right, and it’s Trelawny and his dad at his dad’s house, and Trelawny is doing something that he can’t take back and it’s a hinge moment in their relationship there is absolutely and I’m not going to tell people exactly what he’s doing but just know that his relationship with his father, this is the moment. This is the moment where the kid makes a very, very bad call. But dad is also not making a great call. And yet, it starts actually more with dad’s story than Trelawny. So let’s let’s talk about what went into this particular story for a second.

Yeah. When I when I was first thinking about it, I was wondering is this Trelawny’s story? You know Trelawny, being the son, his father Topper, and his mother, Sanya made the decision in the 1970s to move the family to Miami from Kingston. You know, when I was thinking about Trelawny and his relationship with his father and his relationship with this Jamaican-ness, his idea that maybe the family should never have emigrated to the US, I wanted to look back and think about what what was the decision making process like and how do we actually, you know, there’s a way in which maybe I could have just had the entire story somehow take place in that final scene, which ends at Topper’s retirement party, I just thought it would be more interesting to actually see the the family’s move and see everything that they go through as a result of that move. And I see that final action that Trelawny takes in the story is this kind of ending of possibilities, or at least an attempt at ending, I guess, the health of the family unit in as they will be moving forward in the United States. So I thought, well, how can we back this up to Topper and I was thinking about Topper coming from the Jamaican middle class and having within his particular context, actually having a ton of options when he was a younger person, that at least in relation to you know, some of the other populations in Jamaica like he has he has access to his family’s vehicles. His father is a business owner, life starts off for him pretty good. And I think he thinks things are going to continue to kind of go without the struggle that he does not anticipate. And so once I had my starting point, I just really wrote towards that final image at the end of the story at this party where I think Topper does something that he can never take back as well and Trelawny responds poorly.

So Ling, you’re doing a not dissimilar thing in the story Tomorrow, which actually caps out the Bliss Montage collection. You’ve got a woman who’s facing her future, but also looking at her past but can we talk about the baby arm? Can we please talk about the baby arm in Tomorrow.

It came to me in a dream. Okay, as much as I’m responsible for a dream. For a long time, I thought this is a ridiculous story. Why am I writing it? Is this just about penis envy or something? Just to recap, I guess the premise it’s, the pregnant woman walks around with this fetal arm protruding out of her. It’s in this sort of futuristic America on the decline. And that’s literally all I started out with. They’re in Miami, she’s in Miami, she has a medical emergency. Okay, and then so I started following a few things, the anxiety about the healthcare system, just very challenged healthcare system. And then, okay, where is she gonna end up, what are safe places. So she ends up going to, I guess, her home country. And there’s this idea, I think maybe she plays with like, this romanticism of like going back to your homeland, and then reconnecting in some way with your relatives, even though there’s only really one relative left, right before she’s going to give birth. But the baby arm really sort of, mystified me. Throughout the whole story. I kept thinking of Chekhov’s gun. Okay, what is this gun going to go off? What does this mean? It took me to some unexpected places I guess.

Yiyun there’s there’s a little bit with the girls with Agnès and Fabienne and their tales. There’s, there’s this idea when you know, when Agnes first gets to her finishing school, and the other girls are saying, well, you’re not exactly what we expected, I read your book. They don’t call it gross, but they’re very surprised by sort of how dark and bleak it is. And suddenly Agnes says, Well, maybe I’m, wait. She’s sort of asking questions about where she’s going and what her future is and what her past was like and you’re playing with time in a very similar way to what Ling is doing not just in Tomorrow, but the baby arm..

Let’s just say that there’s even product to keep the baby arm moisture and warm, I almost screamed. That’s funny, because in Agnès and Fabienne’s book, there was a baby, it was a dead baby. Not only the baby died, they make the baby go away. They made that baby go away by feeding the dead baby to animals. So people started to say wow, You know, reader started to write to the girls and wow, you discovered a new way to destroy evidence of murder evidence. And the funny thing I think this goes back to our earlier talk about anticipation and subvert anticipation. Fabienne did not know growing up in the village, and living in that time, she did not know this was not right. It’s just her life. It’s like air and water for her. And I think when she goes to the finishing school, and all the other girls really say that, like, You’re crazy, right? That’s those stories we don’t really like, I think that’s the funniest part of the novel. Actually, for me, it’s just, she is taken out of her own world and go into a normal sort of, you know, normalized, you know, finishing school life. And she realized that’s where, not only she doesn’t fit, but there’s no purity, there’s no imagination, everything is according to the rules. I do think of, you know, Ling’s baby arm as that dead baby in my book, it’s like, you cannot forget it. Sort of you have to carry it with you.

Well, and it’s the truth of the story. I mean, all of you are writing about truth in a way that is slightly unexpected. I think, certainly, I never expected Trelawny to be living out of his car. You know, I mean, you hear about this kid struggling, and then you wait. And there’s that one job that he has, where he’s working at the old folks home, and he’s got to chase the guy around to get him to sign the paperwork. There’s a lot happening there. But I want to talk about editorial process for a second, because each of you are working in similar veins. You’re asking lots of questions about why people do what they do and why they make the choices they make. But if you’re sitting down and granted, you all have MFA, so it’s not like suddenly you were faced with a blank screen and a cursor that was blinking at you and it was not. Where does your first set of readers come in? Where does your editor come in? Where are you sitting down and saying, Okay, this is passable, I will show it to another human being,

I usually don’t show it to my editor until maybe later in the process. But maybe in the middle of the process, I’ll show it to some of my friends and some of my former MFA cohort, there’s really no sense in having people tell me things I already know have to be fixed. So you just try to push it as far as you can, to get to a point where you’re not sure where to go anymore. And it’s good to have someone read it.

Yeah, it’s very similar with me, I’d say my, my number two person is my agent, you know, and she’s, she’s wonderful about giving feedback and being open to it. But I tried to get her the, you know, the most finished finished version. And I can before that happens, I’ve been in just a lot of programs over the last many years. So I’ve collected my best readers from, you know, like my PhD program and the Stegner, and people I met during my MFA. And it’s usually I’m waiting for somebody else to I’m not really waiting, but it just the energy that aligns with the writing community such that you know, one person will have a story that they really want feedback on, right around the same time, I want feedback on my my story. So I usually kind of find those people. So the I’m not calling somebody up four years later, saying, Hey, you gave me good feedback in my MFA, remember? How about you give me some feedback here.

I think it has changed for me in either beginning of my career, I would have a couple of really good first readers. And now I feel that I have worked with good editors. Now I feel that I have trained myself to read my own work as an editor, and as a, you know, reader. So I was, I mean, I think with all my work, I’ve been probably the harshest reader than anyone else. So that said, I do think with The Book of Goose, there’s an interesting moment, that original draft was 150 pages longer than what you got and there was a lot more. And I think at some point, this is one good editor I showed to Mitzi, who is my editor, and Mitzi said, you know, this book wants to be one thing, you sort of want the book to be another thing, I knew that I have to cut those 150 pages, and I just start cutting. And so, I do think at some point, I need someone to say, Wait, maybe you are being willful, You’re being stubborn. You’re making this book into something else. So I always have that moment where it’s a story or with a novel.

Yeah, I do feel like with The Book of Goose too, it’s the perfect length because the chapters are remarkably short, which I wasn’t expecting because I also made a point of actually not reading the catalog copy. I just I wanted to go into it cold. So I was kind of like, Alright, who is this little girl and her voice was very— Agnes’ voice was very clear to me and Fabienne’s voice was very clear to me and I was like, Oh, What are these two up to? And where are we going? And then the story just pushes forward. So I’m sure it was a lot of work. But I’m glad, the pacing is great. And I do want to talk to all of you about pacing, because that’s something actually that you do have to sort of sit with. The voice, I mean, it’s clear to me that you all have voice sorted. That you know what you want the voice to be, I mean, Ling I loved what you were saying about how Severance was kind of the cold, reptilian, and this is the warm, mammalian, Bliss Montage is a much more warm, mammalian kind of story collection. And I think voice is that kind of thing, especially certainly as a reader, voice is the thing I love. But you know when it’s right. And I think you certainly the three of you know when you have the right voice. But can we talk about pacing for a second in a story collection, you can do it not only with the layout of the stories in the order they appear in the book, but also within the stories themselves and it’s not easy.

I’m so glad you asked about pacing, because pacing is to me sort of very much connected to editing and revising, I think always asking so we can get a voice right away. Get it right. Pacing, I think it was short stories with novels both I think oftentimes when I revise, it’s moving things around right, cutting, it’s actually just getting to the right pacing. Because when we work on something, we work for months and years. We don’t have that urgency anymore. We’re just you know, writing, or just writing one page or two page. But yeah, so pacing. I wonder if, you know, when we aim for that right pacing, that’s when we start to really train ourselves to be an editor rather than just a writer.

Jonathan, how does that change? Or does that change if you’re writing in the second person, because you pull that off early. In If I Survive You, you’ve got that great, great story where it’s written wholly in the second person and the pacing there is not nothing. Can we talk about that?

Yeah, the first the opening to stories are both in second person so hopefully, hopefully people like second person. I think in a sense, that comes back to training yourself to have a good read on what interests readers what will hold them for a unit of time and push them forward. And for me in the sense that it might be a series of handoffs of questions that they might like to know the answer to and they’ll read forward and you know, when I if I have them the most gripped or at least I believe so then I might do something more interesting with language. In that opening story, Trelawny, he is trying to figure out his identity, like who he is, people are really, it is a kind of necessity because people keep, you know, hitting him in a barrage of questions like What are you? And every time he says, Okay, I’m this, this is my answer to your question. They say, No, that’s not actually what you are, we don’t think so we don’t believe you, he pushes into kind of these absurd trial runs with different corners of his identity, he, you know, tries on Blackness in weird ways where he starts to walk differently and talk differently and dress differently and listen to different kinds of music then when he leans into his Jamaican-ness, he does, you know, similar things. My idea at different times is that if I think I have the reader’s attention for a given amount of time, I might play with language more and really let him you know, delve into his idea of how he might go about speaking the Jamaican language in a convincing way that will satiate these people who demand of him answers that they just, they just don’t really accept from him. In any case, you know, we’re all multi dimensional people, but I think the story allowed me to kind of take those parts of his identity bit by bit and really focus in on them and try to have these like, distilled version of like race or ethnicity and do so in such a way that, you know, we might come away understanding that, you know, a human being cannot live that way. Not in the way that Trelawny is going about it anyway,

Did you need to write that story in the second person? Because it feels like that story was not going to go in any other form to me, but I’m on other side of it than you were.

You know, it’s second person like I view it as Trelawny having this conversation with himself and he’s able to criticize his own actions, his own responses to this phenomenon of that question, “what are you” He’s critiquing the minor characters and the voices that are coming at him but he’s also judging his own actions throughout I think, and for me, it creates moments where there can be humor in a way where he self deprecating, but it’s not so much a performance of self deprecation. My influences, like the people who do second person best, they often paired second person with this kind of long time. And because we’re talking about this variation in how he is dealing with his identity, I thought that really needed to be explored over the course of years, rather than, you know, weeks or months, and so we, we spent about, I don’t know, like 20 years with him in flux, and the second person long time allowed me to kind of move at a really good pace through that time,

I want to switch gears a tiny bit, because Ling there’s a story you have that I’m really kind of dying to ask you about: Returning. Which is, it’s the longest story in Bliss Montage. I can’t let go of the woman who’s narrating this story. And, you know, the idea of she and her husband have flown to the country that he’s from and he has left her in the airport. So can we talk about that voice and that character and that story and how that all came about? Because it really I don’t think I’m going to shake that story anytime, so I’m certainly not going to shake the baby arm. I mean, can we talk about Returning for a second?

Yeah, sure. Well, I was thinking about what you were asking about pacing earlier. And I just want to mention some of these stories when I look back at them, such as Los Angeles, the first story and Love Making, I wrote them when I was much younger. So there is this sort of impatience, I, what I see myself doing is sort of like bumper cars, I’m kind of going as fast as I can until I hit something. And then I switched gears. I think there is a bit of a fear that the reader is going to get bored and having worked at at a magazine in the magazine world, it’s very much about like the snappy hook. And I can see the influence of having worked at magazines, in those early stories of mine. The later stories in the collection, I think I learned how to take more of my time with it and Returning is the longest story in the collection. And I probably couldn’t have allowed myself to write a story of that length when I was younger. I just felt like, Wow, it’s so slow. It’s so tedious. There’s a side of me that just I want to be like, entertained by myself, I guess immediately. Yes, I think in Returning, I agree with you. It’s definitely the most intimate one. In some ways, the gold standard for me in voice actually, I think about the zines that I used to read in the 90s, early 00s. You know, I’d go to Quimby’s in Chicago, and I look at these personal zines. And also, I would say the early days of blogging, before we understood what the internet was, when there was nothing at stake for the people writing. And I don’t see that kind of zine, early blog voice in literature very much. It feels much more manicured, I try to think about that type of voice, especially for a story like Returning which, you know, it’s very, I would say, it’s not like the most dazzling premise, but I think it works because of the intimacy of these sort of disclosures of this female narrator.

Yiyun I want to come back to you for two things. One is you’ve been working with the magazine still, correct? You’re still with A Public Space? How do you switch gears between doing the magazine work and writing fiction now because I mean, A Public Space is a different kind of magazine.

So the longer I work on a magazine, the more I think maybe I’m meant to be an editor. I really love editing words. And I just worked with this young writer, Ada Zhang, on her collection of stories, you know, we went through the story, many drafts. I think it’s different than writing my own stories more, I think that makes me a different kind of reader. I’m very harsh reader of my own work. So I’m also a harsh reader of most people’s work. But when you’re an editor being harsh, is not the point, you know, understanding and meeting where the writer is and trying to understand, also trying to sort of push a writer a little forward, in a little deeper or a little broader. That, to me is very satisfying experience. It’s really like cultivating it’s like gardening, right? You know, what the flowers are going to do, they’re going to do it on their own too, but I’m just nudging them. I’m just taking care of them, you know, for a year of time momentarily in their lives. So that’s different than writing Yeah, I feel I’m much more patient as an editor.

Okay, so we have a good idea of who you all are. Now as writers we have a good idea of who you are when you’re editing your own work at least, and others. But who are you as readers? Who are the big influences? Who are the other writers that you go back to? Who have you been reading lately? Like, let’s just jump in and do the fun part of the Oh, yeah. Have you heard of this? Because also, I have to tell you, Jonathan, when I started reading your collection, I kept thinking about Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia because he does that same thing with the voice. And you’re just like, oh, where’s this going?

Oh, that’s been on my to read list for for a minute. And I have yet to get to it, so I’ll bump it up. I’m a huge fan of Paul Beatty. You know, the humor in his writing is just phenomenal. And I went through a phase, not a phase, just a period where I read so much Kurt Vonnegut, it all almost merged into, it was beyond a single book in my mind and there was just so much humanity and humor. Like I can’t imagine myself writing this book without having read Nella Larsen, Passing too but particularly Quicksand because in that novel, we have a character who has a totally different experience with her identity, her biracial identity in the south versus Chicago versus Harlem, versus Scandinavia. That book was I think, written in the 20s. And, you know, to me, it still reads like it could have been yesterday, you know, it could have come out today. It just felt like such brave writing about race and the nuances of race and the nuances of Blackness in America that I just think is phenomenal.

Yeah, White Boy Shuffle actually reads like it was written last year, and it’s, I think, 20 years old at this point, or maybe even older than— I can’t remember the first year I read it. But I remember thinking, Who is this guy? I need more. And luckily, we’ve gotten lots more but it really White Boy Shuffle really, it holds. Yiyun, can we talk about William Trevor for a second, one of your big influences, and I’m so fond of him and not everyone reads him anymore.

I know, isn’t that true? I would say I am a re-reader more than a reader. You know, I truly believe what Nabokov said you cannot read, you can only re-read. I just started to do this experiment, because I wanted to see how much time I do rereading versus reading on a daily basis. I feel, maybe I spent five hours rereading, and one hour reading new work that’s about you know, the ratio. You know, William Trevor, for certain I read, I read him or I reread him. He’s written 30 books and still I got to the point I thought, you know, I wish there were another 30 books, so I can always, you know, be immersed in his word. He is my biggest influence, the attention he pays to, and also the just care he takes with the characters, with stories, with novel and so he’s my biggest influence. And I, you know, of course, Tolstoy. I read all the time Tolstoy together, and I read Moby Dick every year. Every time I finish Moby Dick, I have this moment, I’m thinking, Oh, no, I finished it again, I need to go back right away. Because I feel like there are things I’ve been missing from the book. So those are sort of my rereading a lot of books or rereading. And I read a lot the dictionaries I have at least five different dictionaries on my desk at this moment, I just, whenever I have a few minutes, I just open a dictionary. I have a garden dictionary, just reading, you know, plants names. And then I have, you know, Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, so I like to spend a lot of times with words and just to know how they sound, what they mean, you know, the history, how they become the words we use today. So those are kind of things I do all the time.

Well, I have to say I’m pretty guilty of starting books, and then casting them aside. Usually, the books that I read all the way through that continue to grip me much of it has to do with voice, particularly the first person voice, if the voice is there, I will go anywhere with them. Some things that have stuck with me are A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which he wrote about his mother’s life. You know, it’s a difficult book to read. It feels like almost compulsory, like he couldn’t do anything but write this. It’s such a sort of powerful and painful book to read but passages from it, I still think about. I also like the short stories of Miranda July, I think every one of her narrators are very, very specific people. I often work with narratives that have surreal premises and the problem with that is often it can get very gimmicky. You have to make sure that you can still emotionally anchor the story in some way. And so I often think back to Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls for that a ridiculous premise, but wonderfully emotive sort of piece just kind of vibrating with emotion, the whole thing. So those are some, I guess, reference points. And also did I mention Frank O’Hara’s poetry, which is what the most read book for me in high school, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, that was the book that got me thinking about voice a lot more. He wrote, what was it this manifesto, he called it called “Personism”, there was a line in there where he says, if someone is chasing you down the street with a knife, you don’t turn around and describe the person chasing you, you just continue to run, and I think about that line all the time when I am trying to get the voice right. Those are some reference points.

I love that Frank O’Hara. I really do. So what’s next for everyone? Have you started new books?

Well, I have a collection of stories coming out next year, you know, my last collection Gold Boy, Emerald Girl came out in 2008. So it’s been almost 15 years, I’ve been writing short stories. So that’s, that’s my next book I’m working on, you know, a bunch of other things.

I’m working on a novel. But story ideas keep coming to me and so I’m very heavily in my my notes app. And I feel like I’m really I’m writing a next story collection while I’m writing the novel, and I’m under contract for a novel. So we’ll see.

I’m just working on more fiction. I don’t know if it’s a novel or not. But there was a an abandoned novel that I tried to make happen before Severance. I actually think I’m rewriting it. Although the characters and the premise are completely different. It seems to be circling around the same questions that were embedded in the abandoned project. So it’s one thing I’m working on.

It all sounds very, very cool. You know, I realized we’re bumping up against all sorts of time constraints, and everyone has to get back to the work. So on that note, Ling Ma, Bliss Montage is out now. Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You is also out now. And Yiyun Li, your book will be out moments after this podcast comes out. So everyone should preorder it now and then buy The Book of Goose when it’s in stores. Thank you all so much for making the time to do this. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having us.

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