New England Review

Welcome to Jennifer Chang

New Poetry Editor for NER

We are delighted to announce that Jennifer Chang will join us as poetry editor in March 2021.

Jennifer Chang brings to NER her vision and experience as a deeply committed writer and literary citizen—as well as, she says, “a judicious sense of pluralism and communion.”

While Jennifer will be new to this role, she has a longstanding connection to New England Review. The magazine was among her first publications as a poet, in 2004, and more recently NER published her essay “Looking for Wong May” (2020), as part of a special feature from the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival. She has held editorial roles at Poetry Daily and ISLE, and has served on the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Poetry screening committee and as a reader for the Yale Younger Poetry Series.

Jennifer Chang is the author of two poetry collections, Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017) and The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and has published her writing in many journals, including the Believer, the Baffler, Poetry, the Literary Review, and the New Yorker. An associate professor of English at George Washington University, she is on the MFA faculty at Bennington College and co-chair of the Advisory Board of Kundiman.

New England Review, she says, “signifies a living history, a community of generous effort, and a future collectively envisioned.” This new role will allow her to “build on long-held investments in poetry’s long and varied histories.”

NER’s current poetry editor, Rick Barot, will edit two more issues—42.1 and 42.2, to be published in March and June 2021. Rick began his work as poetry editor in September 2014, when he set out, as he noted later, “to feature poetry that is representative of the variety of excellent poetry now being written in the United States, and to bring as many new poets into the magazine’s pages as possible.” In keeping with that promise, the poetry selections of one issue each year have been entirely comprised of poets who had not previously appeared in NER. At the same time he has brought to NER vital new work by poets whose influence and significance has long been recognized, as well as by those whose voices are just beginning to be heard.

Jennifer Chang’s first issue as poetry editor will be published in September 2021. Jennifer’s commitment and generosity, her deep love for poets and poetry, and her passion for the community that NER has created over the years will allow her to bring both continuity and change to our poetry section. We are so pleased to welcome her to our editorial team!

Welcome to NER 41.4

Focus on Emerging Writers

The winter 2020 issue of New England Review, shipping now from the printer, is by turns bracing, inspiring, surprising, and devastating. Like every issue of NER, it gives readers a chance to expand their sense of the known world through language, image, and narrative. But what’s different is that this issue is almost entirely populated by emerging writers, and for many this is among their first publications.

You’ll find essays about the training of bots, the loss of narrative in farming, land “reclamation” in Colorado, and the possible meanings behind a single lost shoe. Eight short stories explore a sea turtle preserve; the August heat in Austin; a spa in Koreatown, LA; and a women’s shelter in Juarez, Mexico. Also included are fifteen poets, all new to NER; translations by Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez; and cover art by Ralph Lazar.

See the full table of contents here, dig into some samples, and order a print or ebook edition today.

There’s a good chance you’ll read them here first, but we expect you’ll be seeing these writers around again soon!

Behind the Byline

Victoria Chang

Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence.

Photo credit: Margaret Molloy

Victoria Chang, author of the “Marfa, Texas” (NER 41.4) and “Obit” series (NER 38.3) talks to NER reader Sabrina Islam about meditations on loss and grief, and on finally writing her truth: “I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.”

Sabrina Islam: Your meditation on loss and grief in Obit is incredible. In “Grief” you write, “A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion. / My grief is not the same as my pain. My / mother was a mathematician so I tried / to calculate my grief. My father was an / engineer so I tried to build a box around / my grief, along with a small wooden / bed that grief could lie down on. The / texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing / me to speak about nothing.” How has grief become an obsession for you and what particular value is present in thinking and writing about the subject of grief?

Victoria Chang: I think why write about anything really? Why write at all? I don’t think we can choose to be writers. I also don’t think we can choose what we write about, at least for some things. Obviously, you can be given assignments or prompts, but even then, our own obsessions seem to creep out. Grief just is. We can’t choose when someone dies (or when we die ourselves), but those left behind grieve. As a writer, I write from deep wells of thinking and feeling, like most writers probably.

SI: Grief continues. In the newer series, “Marfa, Texas,” you write, “Is it // possible to stop loving / everything? The owl. The / hawk. Every person I meet. To / see everyone as my mother. To / have a heart // like this is to be made of / midnight.” You’ve poured your grief into Obit, then into “Marfa, Texas.” Do the poems ever speak back to you? How is your grief evolving and changing you?

VC: Poems always speak to us! Most of the time, we don’t listen very well. Writing, but mostly revising feels a lot like listening to the poems. Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because sometimes whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence. It’s ignoring me for a reason. Usually that means to let it sit or go read something else in a different genre or something entirely different. But given my stubborn personality, I usually just keep reading a manuscript again and again and even if I change one word, I think of it as a miracle and thank my manuscript. Right now, I’m reading academic articles. Sometimes I read philosophy. I actually enjoy reading literary criticism textbooks. I don’t watch movies but I love reading movie criticism.

SI: Your words become increasingly charged and powerful in the sequence “Marfa, Texas.” The last poem in the series ends, “To love so much is to live / within birds. // I have been waiting for / this heart to fade or at / least to kneel. Maybe the / heart is not inside me but I / am inside it.” You frequently write sequences: why are you drawn to this form?

VC: I think the obsessive person can be drawn into sequences. It’s the form of relentless pursuit. The trouble is that there’s always a gap so the obsessive person is running on a treadmill within that gap. I like to call that gap the gap of estrangement. That’s where I reside. That’s my address. I used to make apologies for being so obsessive, but now I just embrace that disposition and personality. My father was/is a lot like this. It feels chemical in the brain actually. I also think obsessiveness has something to do with immigration, estrangement from a country and white supremacist institutions. The chasing is a part of obsession because the gap of estrangement can never be filled. I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.

SI: Circles often appear in your poetry collections. In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” How does the form of a circle stimulate your thinking process?

VC: As sloppy a person as I am, I am always surprised at how I can make patterns, see patterns, or think in patterns. My brain often feels like a pinball machine. But then I can be exceptionally organized and linear when necessary. I love how malleable and unfixed the brain is/can be. It’s important (to me at least) not to stereotype myself, if that makes sense. We’re all multitudinous. We are exceptionally flexible. My attitude has always been “why not?” and this has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past, but in art-making at least, I would say it is my governing principle (if I even have one consciously). Experimentation is very important to me as a person, trying new things, the new, the fresh.

SI: Your new book Love, Love is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse about a girl who slowly solves the mystery of her sister’s strange illness, which we learn is trichotillomania. The protagonist, Frances, is also dealing with bullying and grappling with her developing identity. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese American family, why was it important for you to write this story?

VC: I’ve tried to write that story so many times (and just wrote another essay on this material). Sometimes we are at the center of our own narratives. Other times, we are not main characters. In my sister’s struggles, I was not the protagonist but a side character. I have begun to recognize that this doesn’t mean I wasn’t impacted (or implicated) by our family’s trauma surrounding this mysterious illness. There are a lot of unspoken traumas in our family, mostly centered around my mother, that only now, after she has passed, can I even properly or adequately reflect on. I have a whole book exploring these things that I am working hard on at this very moment. As an immigrant’s child, there’s also a reckoning with my parents’ trauma and my mother’s trauma and I am writing about all of this now.

SI: Realist painter Edward Hopper’s work prominently features in your earlier collection The Boss, which explores, among other things, American corporate life and power structures. How does visual art inspire poetry for you?

VC: I am very interested in visual art, the visual, aesthetics. How things look matters to me a lot. I am very interested in design, architecture, sculpture. I think this is pretty common amongst poets who spend a lot of time “seeing” things in their minds and in real life. I am working on some visual elements for a new book right now as well. If I could be any other kind of artist, I would be a visual artist. I took a lot of art classes growing up, but then somewhere along the way, switched over more to writing.

SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?

VC: So many! Too many to name here. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bishop. Tranströmer, Glück, Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Plath of course, Eliot, Stevens, Lee. So many contemporary poets and writers I admire too. I could list them here, but I fear I would leave too many people out. We are in a rich time of poetry.

SI: In your poem “Instinct” you ask, “What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, / even their own?” Writing about war and genocide, your work often wrestles with the truly vile parts of human history. In “Ode to Iris Chang” you consider, “How // to trust humans. // How to trust the earth / when all that is there is a // derivative of mud.” What motivates you as a writer to continually return to the page and still explore humanity?

VC: As a writer, I’ve always tried to honor my own truth, whether that truth went against the grain or with the grain. I can’t and won’t be anyone else. I used to feel a lot of shame for not being like other people, but now I try harder to write what feels true to me. I used to think I was supposed to sound like other writers, but I think perhaps starting with my third book, I gave up on that. I just began to write what rang true to me instead of trying to be like everyone else. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. I think I grew up a little bit (finally). This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback, though. I listen really closely to feedback from close friends who are kind enough to read my work. Sometimes, depending on what I’m working on, I need more feedback than other times. I think a writer needs many things, but persistence and a doggedness are two qualities that can be important. If I didn’t have these qualities, I don’t think I would have been able to survive the brutal literary world. I also think a writer needs to simply love writing. I do and always have. If I have nothing else, I know that I really like writing. As I get older and older, I am less afraid of writing about those harder things. The fear, though, is usually how others will perceive the writing or me. At some point, I have just accepted that poets in particular can be very harsh and judgmental. They won’t like hardly anything anyone writes anyway, so why bother trying to please them? I am more interested in pleasing myself.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Victoria.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

 

Behind the Byline

May-lee Chai

Imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better.

Bob Hsiang Photography

May-lee Chai, author of the essay “Women of Nanjing” (NER 41.3), talks to nonfiction staff reader Belinda Huang about the determined strength of women, from those she has seen in passing in Nanjing to her very own grandmother. Their stories assure her that she, and we, will get through this current moment in history because, as she says, “I have resources and tools and I can fight.”

Belinda Huang: Part of what drew me to this essay is how you situate yourself as an observer, even though you have visited Nanjing many times and have a family connection through your grandmother. Your focus seems to be on presenting these women to the reader without embellishment, creating a kind of patchwork portrait of the women of Nanjing. Why did you choose to write this essay in this way, instead of centering your own experiences?

May-lee Chai: I’ve written other essays that did center my experiences, so for this particular essay it really began with my memory of the middle-aged woman in the fabulous yellow chiffon outfit carrying her fluffy white dog across a busy street in Nanjing. Something about this image really struck a chord with me and moved me quite deeply. I wanted to unpack that, unpack my feelings and memories and try to understand why I felt I had witnessed something special. Growing up in the US, I saw so few images of Chinese women, and historically the American media has typically portrayed Chinese women as victims, as weak and subservient and oppressed creatures who need to be saved. And here was this woman on a street in Nanjing who looked like she’d lived through some things and yet here she was decked out in yellow chiffon, and I was just so happy to see her. I decided to start the essay with this memory and see where I could move from there.

BH: You move between women of different generations, who have had varying experiences at the intersection of gender and history. But to me, many of the women do share a kind of strength, determination, and perhaps even a sense of humor when reacting to unexpected or difficult situations. How do you approach the tension between the universal and the particular when writing about Chinese history, culture, and people?

MLC: I was very aware of writing about the passage of time and generational shifts in this essay. I wanted to pick examples from women whom I had met in Nanjing that I felt could illustrate these very great changes that had occurred in the span of a little over 100 years. For me those changes are most visible in particular examples, in the specific women I’ve known or encountered or who are family and friends. The “strength, determination, and . . . sense of humor” are there because that’s how these women really are!

BH: In this essay, you touch briefly on the history of the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women, but what we really see is how quickly the past can fade into museum pieces—quite literally. While your grandmother grieved the family and home she was exiled from, many of the women who grew up during the Cultural Revolution have now adapted to a modern China, and though they may be driven by their history, they do not seem weighed down by it. How do you think our relationship with history changes? What draws you to continue examining your family’s history through essay and memoir?

MLC: In the US, “The Rape of Nanking” is still the one thing that Americans might associate with Nanjing, but other than that, there may not be any reason for most Americans to think of the city. But for me, the city was always my grandmother’s hometown. It was the home she was never able to see again after she left China in 1949 at the end of the Civil War. I grew up with her sorrow and her pain. I witnessed that at every family dinner which erupted into an argument about the past. History wasn’t just a series of dates in a textbook, something dead and finished and knowable; history was family, was pain, was memory, was very much a living, changing, omnipresent relationship to the past. Chinese history isn’t something that my teachers talked about at all when I was growing up. I had to seek out this history in college and then by returning to live and study in Nanjing. By engaging with Nanjing in the present, I could try to come to an understanding of how this history lived in my own family and in me and how this personal family history differed from how other Chinese people and families experienced it.

BH: Your Nai-nai is such a strong presence in this piece, and I can imagine she was in life as well. You write that “her faith in the future was surely not rational, but it was essential, and it was ultimately effective.” Faith as a necessary, active state of mind seems as applicable to the challenges of today as it was to surviving revolution in China. How does this notion of faith hold true for you when thinking of the women in your essay, and in your own life?

MLC: Well, 2020 has been a year that required all of us to have a lot of faith that a better future was possible. Without that kind of faith, hope is impossible, and without hope, activism seems futile. In the present things have been pretty awful from week to week; the increase in anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism and violence is scary. And the rising appeal of fascism in the US has been a very ugly thing to witness. It’s easy for me to get depressed if I just look rationally at the state of affairs. However, I have to give myself the pep talk: imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better. Despair is easy but we have to keep making decisions and work for the best, and that requires hope and faith. And I’ve never had to live through an invasion, as she did, so I remind myself that I can get through this moment. I have resources and tools and I can fight.

BH: Your essay takes us up to the present day, highlighting the resilience Chinese women continue to demonstrate in the face of racism and worsening US–China relations. We are corresponding in the week after the 2020 US election, with Joe Biden as president-elect. Does that change how you feel about the way Asian and Chinese immigrants are being seen and treated? How do you see this essay, and/or your work, in this context?

MLC: My writing is definitely one tool that I use to fight against stereotypes and to fight the anti-Chinese/anti-Asian racism. It’s one way that I can center my humanity. So much of this election season has been a painful reminder that we Asian Americans are still seen as eternal foreigners in our own country and as threats to the US. President Trump kept calling the COVID-19 virus the “China virus” or the “Kung flu.” When Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail, various Republican officials made fun of her name, calling her “Kamala-mala” or deliberately mispronouncing her very easy-to-pronounce name. It’s so juvenile, but it’s also effective racist rhetoric to Other her, to demean her, and to make her seem threatening because of her Asian first name. This racism is familiar and exhausting but, at least this time, it did not work. Biden/Harris won. Their win won’t be enough to end the racism. I have no illusions about that, but it gives me hope and energy. I will keep fighting, I will keep writing.

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and others.

Belinda Huang is a writer, editor, and NER nonfiction reader living on Darug land in Sydney, Australia. She holds a BFA from Emerson College, Boston, and previously worked at Ploughshares. Her work appears in Story Cities: A City Guide for the Imagination.

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