Lia Dun is a nonbinary chinese american writer living in San Francisco. Their writing explores the intersections of asian american and queer identities. Lia's work has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Exposition Review, and Autostraddle.
Why do you write? What compels you to write? I usually give a smartass response to this, like "I write because I don't know how to have a real career" or "I enjoy being useless to humanity." It feels embarrassing to take myself seriously, but I'm trying harder now. These days, it's become even more obvious how art keeps us connected and helps us imagine new possibilities. Also, it makes me happy, another thing I'm making an effort to believe is important. What upcoming writing projects are you working on? I'm working on a few essays. About a year ago, I switched from writing mainly fiction to personal essays, and I'm still getting used to putting all these cringey things about myself on the page. What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? I'm so bad at picking people! I'm obsessed with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's writing. I hadn't heard of disability justice before I read her work, and it changed the way I think about basically everything. Also, her work is just so direct, angry, full of joy, and funny at the same time. Another writer whose work I really love is Kai Cheng Thom, especially her poem "trauma is not sacred." A few months ago, I read We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, and I want to be hilarious while writing about deep shit like that. In middle school, I liked to read and write fanfiction, mostly for the anime Yu Yu Hakusho, which is about a teenage boy who saves the world from demons. Most of it was pretty awful, but it was also so gay and overflowing with feelings in a way that wasn't self-conscious at all. I think a lot of my writing practice as an adult has been trying to recapture that experience of writing because I wanted to and not knowing or caring if it was good or bad. Celeste Chan is a writer and filmmaker schooled by Do-It-Yourself Culture and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. She co-directed Queer Rebels, created experimental film programs for OUTsider and MIX NYC, ran Writing Rainbow, and toured with Sister Spit. She serves as a board member for Foglifter Journal.
from the artist Why do you write? What compels you to write? So many reasons! I often feel I am trying to go back in time to excavate and heal my family’s history. I am trying to leave traces for others, to process what I could not otherwise process, to scare myself, to make an offering, to connect and be part of a greater conversation. What upcoming writing projects are you working on? I’m working on a memoir and a novel. That feels scary to say, so now I must do it. Make it real. Accountability! Describe your work in five words: Earnest, experimental, imagistic, QUEER, hybrid, and often documentary. What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? I will say that I love Moonlight (directed by Barry Jenkins and adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney's semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue). I love Lynda Barry, always. I need to imprint that comic in my mind - art is “not something that you are good or bad at, it is just something that you do.” The first queer book I ever read was Randal Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits. It is a gorgeously crafted novel. As a young queer, I latched onto the story of a closeted young Black man who comes to understand himself through Einstein’s theory of relativity. I return to The Gangster We Are All Looking For for its form—fragmentary, impressionistic, nonlinear —and content: the melancholy of migration, filial love, how war embeds itself within a family, bodies of water, and the shape of loss. Seventeen years after that first encounter, lê thị diễm thúy’s words continue to haunt me. antmen pimentel mendoza (he + she) is a writer based in Ohlone Land (the East San Francisco Bay Area) where he works and dreams alongside students at a university cultural center. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Underblong, and Lantern Review. antmen is online as @antmenismagic.
Why do you write? What compels you to write? I'm compelled to write for a few reasons, I think. I write for fun, as play, for pleasure. I write to connect, to be in community. I write to process, to document, towards healing (I hope). Also, my tatay's favorite activity is kwentuhan and my nanay was a great storyteller, too. I think they definitely influence my writing. Describe your work in five words I watched too much VH1. What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? My families, reality television, Franny Choi's Soft Science, Robyn's music video for "Ever Again," Michael DeForge's Big Kids, Beyoncé's Super Bowl half time show and Lemonade, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Kate Bush's album Hounds of Love, Chen Chen's When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my Switch. Yeva Johnson, a poet whose work appears or is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review and Sinister Wisdom, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A past Artist-in-Residence for Show Us Your Spines, part of the Marin Poetry Center and QTPOC4SHO, an artists’ collective, Yeva explores interlocking caste systems and human connections. Artist Statement Yeva Johnson, a Black American Jewish queer Lesbian feminist pacifist Unitarian Universalist mother and musician, is an emerging poet who works as a family physician by day. Yeva’s poems are lyrical explorations of social hierarchies and interlocking caste-systems, the life cycle, nature and possibilities for interconnection. In a process she calls meta-ekphrastic, Yeva blends art, music, literature and other experiences to cross boundaries. Her poems engage the reader/listener on multiple levels and touch people at their soft centers either through the written page or in performance. Yeva believes that art can connect us to the present, past, and future. Some of Yeva’s favorite poets include Arisa White, Dawn McGuire, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eve L. Ewing, Lucille Clifton, Lynn Emanuel, Pat Parker, Patricia Smith, and Sappho. Yeva has been invited to be a reader at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in August and September of 2020 (www.MOADsf.org). We're BACK with another rendition of RADAR's GLOW feature, where we spotlight QTPOC writers in the community. Did you miss us? We're very lucky to showcase Yodassa Williams! Her debut novel, The Goddess Twins, was released this past May and it's a fantastic magical adventure that takes the reader from Ohio to London. The novel follows identical twins, Arden and Aurora, as they develop their telepathic and telekinetic powers while uncovering ancestral secrets. You're not going to regret picking up this book! Yodassa Williams is a Jamaican American writer, speaker, and award winning performing storyteller, passionate about using her curiosity to spark fires inside others. Yodassa is an alumna of the VONA/Voices Travel Writing program, the 2018 Fortify Writers Retreat, and a writing residency with Nefe Nof. She is a blogger for the 2020 Debutante Ball. In October of 2019, Yodassa launched ‘Writers Emerging’ a four day wilderness writing retreat for women of color and non-binary people of color, held at Fly Ranch. Her debut novel, a YA fantasy, details the adventure of seventeen year old Caribbean American twins discovering they are goddesses when their mother goes missing. The Goddess Twins, published by SparkPress in May 2020, is now available on Amazon and IndieBound. Yodassa grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently resides in the Bay Area.
Thea Matthews is a poet / scholar / activist born and raised in San Francisco, CA. She earned her BA in Sociology where she studied and taught June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She writes on the complexities of humanity, grief, and resiliency. She has work in the Acentos Review, Atlanta Review, For Women Who Roar magazine, and others. She is a Tin House scholar; and has delivered her poetry at various festivals including Litquake, Lit Crawl, the National Queer Arts Festival, and the Sonido Music Fest. Her first collection of poetry, Unearth [The Flowers], will be published by Red Light Lit Press spring 2020. Find her IG/Twitter/FB: theamatthews_ and www.theamatthews.com from the artist Poetry validates Truth. To see and be seen, feel and be felt, listen and be heard–– poetry honors the body, memory, resiliency of humanity. When I write, I reclaim my voice and feel my own Power. When I write, I see, feel, listen to Spirit. When I write, I join you in love, dialogue, tension. I am no longer alone. I tap into the Source of Strength. THESE SOFT THINGS
blissful arms womanly arms skinning them selves like apples i am open to interpretation so taste me lick me eat of my flesh and appropriate my suffering it was so long ago that i was walking streets made of conditional love but now i am too filled with fear to walk anywhere with my blissful legs, my bruised arms these soft things leave me happy being alone and untouched leaves me so happy w e r q for lunch i eat hot cheetos & read most days i am too poor & sleep deprived to pack a lunch i put on my best wig paint my eyes crimson i wash my hands in the employee bathroom like ritual still fingers stained red i am the only register o p e n xx always a servile thing wore my best wig for you today, ‘suh didn’t you notice do you like it wore it just for you xx i’m not allowed to touch their hands when they pay me no, this is not written in the handbook call it an unwritten rule people like me just know these things even on my best behavior i be too corner store to touch i pick money off of the counter i am not allowed to make eye contact with them see we don’t even use the same bathroom xx i bet they don’t think i know anything that i’ve never read a book in my life just sell them programmed with answers a servile thing o p e n xx i play girl for 8 hours i play blk for 24 xx this barely pays for my rent but we free now in the union guess that means something to y’all xx i don’t sleep to dream i’ll play dead if you want me to a servile thing even in my dreams i am not blk enough even in my dreams i am anything but AFTER WE SHOOT A BREAKDOWN
IN THE MOVIE OF MY LIFE The director pulls me aside and says they are thinking of rewriting the script. Our original plan was to stay as true to real life as possible but we think it’s just missing something. I am exhausted. We have just filmed the part where I pull out my hair and punch myself in the face as my mother watches. Like what? I ask. It’s just. We know you’re telling the truth when you say this stuff happened. But we don’t know if the audience will be convinced. We think we need to add something to the story to make you behaving like this believable. I touch at my bruised peach of a cheek self-consciously as they continue. No one runs out into the street just because. Or cuts off all their friends out of boredom. There’s got to be a reason. We need to write a scene in that explains this whole thing. It’s not enough to say that your head works like that. It’s not realistic to say that you’d ruin everything around you just because you can. f.lux
get pretty lonely before I pull skin over my eyes one parent loves me even if I’m lying regret text sent in my little window just know you are so my person right now |