Culture Shock: Reassessing the Workshop
My new essay at The Millions
I have spent roughly half my life in Japan. For so long, I had two languages switching back and forth in my mind, one for America, one for Japan. There were different clothes, ways of speaking, foods to eat, body languages, and styles of friendships. It has been an enormous adjustment to permanently return to America in mid-life. I have had to relearn and get re-acclimated to a lot. But I never would have expected that reading and writing would be the most challenging adjustments so far. I had not realized how insular American publishing is, how few books that might broaden Western tastes are actually translated for the American market, and how translations are almost completely ignored in creative writing classes.
My essay in the Millions: Culture Shock: Reassessing the Workshop is a re-reading of Anis Shivani’s Against the Workshop, Matthew Salesses’ wonderful Craft in the Real World and Gish Jen’s Girl at the Baggage Claim. I highly recommend all three for thinking about how different understandings of the self inform the stories we tell.
I also LOVED Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures . I reviewed the book last year in the Asian Review of Books and have been thinking of it nonstop since. I feel like it is the beginnings of a new movement.
Image of painter Morris Graves.
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