Writing in private

Dear reader,

I’m on course to be making some apple tarts this weekend (something that hasn’t changed between Vermont and Washington), and I’m writing, finally, to you. That is, few others have seen it, but I have been writing. I have been writing to my MFA students at Warren Wilson; I have been writing (software) documentation at my job; I have been writing editorial comments, meeting notes, and (soon you’ll see) a letter from the editor. I’ve been looking through the photos I took since 2020 and printing them, putting them on my walls, and sending them to friends. I’ve been trying to remember my life, to break into the great Blank that’s walled me from my recent memories. Erased by depression, dissociation, distance, denial, and death—yes, so much still goes on, and grief veils all of them.

I am writing a new book that seems interminably long. For almost five years, it has dropped like feathers into the bucket of my mind, then blown away. Wisps of what I want to say; hints of how I felt; I was able to get those down, but every time I tried to start a book, I couldn’t do it. I attempted it in the forms I knew and even learned about some other conventions: no, no, no. After 10,000 words, the drafts would sag, not even enough for a midlife. I put the project aside for a while.

In January, I started a new process for myself. Rather than writing into a project, I returned to a more focused version of morning pages. I continued to feel as though I had nothing to say, but I could at least observe the world around me, or the immediate thoughts I had of my days. If I went off on a tangent, no matter how much of a non-sequitur, I let myself. It was the kind the writing that didn’t matter, that would never be shown to anyone. It didn’t have to be anything. Then the veins of my failures began to coalesce and became visible.

It is odd but true that it is only here that I opt to share my most private work while writing. To the people who see me every day, even my partner, all this happens behind closed doors during my morning witching hours. It has been easier, in these Blank years, to live beyond my inner doors, as it is easier to add item after item into the unkempt library of the abandoned closet. When someone sees me, I can see myself reflecting out from their eyes, an outline that draws, like scaffolding, who I’m supposed to be in that moment.

But I am writing. All this private work. All this mess, and disaster, and old beliefs that billow and heave from the rafters. All through the past year, I’ve been working hard to understand who I can retrieve from those hours that erased themselves. I am writing, and what is happening when I write? A quiet drama; the ring of smoke around the unseen coal.

It is almost time—it is time. Time for my agent to get a sheaf of papers in the mail. Time for the rain to start; time for the next letter after this one. Time to show this work, this writing, to someone else. It’s about time: today, the Asian American Literature Festival, after five years of struggle and survival, begins its independent life. It’s time, soon, for Box 68, the newsletter-journal I’m starting for the Asian American Literary Archive; it’s almost September 17, the release date for the Dilettante Army issue that I’ve been working on since April, “Critical Constellations.” It’s time for the fifteenth day of the eighth month; it’s the time for the full moon. The leaves are swimming from the heads of trees; they’re red but mostly green.

The Reading is you, looking through this crack in the door. It is 2024; it is a day someone is dying; a day someone is born. It is any year, any season. In your inner eye, this moment is eternal. I’ll try to remember, too—there is light lapping the shadows from the interminable corridor of the future.

Until next,
y.

Events

Note: All times are in PST.

14 September 2024 15:00
AALF Opening Ceremony: Moonrise
Asian American Literature Festival
Online

18 September 2024 17:00
Asian American Literature Festival: Reorienting Reads Reading with Ally Ang, Såhi Velasco, Yanyi, Persimmon Tobing, Pauline Park, Wo Chan, Fatimah Asghar
Hybrid, Common Area Maintenance and Asian American Writers' Workshop
Seattle, WA and New York, NY

7 December 2024 19:00
Other People's Poems
Open Books
Seattle, WA

24 January 2025 19:00
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster: Muriel Leung in conversation with Yanyi
Third Place Books Ravenna
Seattle, WA