Recap for 2022! Writing Stats & News :)
Actually endeavoring to use this newsletter in 2023. Some of the best essays I've read this year included!
Hello to my -2 subscribers (and Olga <3). It’s been a while, so here’s a quick recap of writing news~
Being an Adroit Mentee for Fiction with Angie Sijun Lou (!!)
A YoungArts Win for Short Story (Merit)
Being selected for the YoungArts Anthology
Getting to nominate a wonderful essay by Aimee Liu for Pushcart (Flat Ink’s very first Pushcart nom!!)
Being asked to serve as a judge for Bluefire (the contest that gave me my real start in the literary world, and run by a teacher who’s lessons helped me immensely)
Over 2022, I wrote:
3 short stories
6 finalized poems
and over 30,000 words of other small writings, ideas, essay pieces, and outlines. I also got to conduct an interview, write 8 papers, and what must be a library’s worth of emails.
I also got the chance to meet many wonderful writers online and in person (found other Berkeley writers, and a Turkic writers group!). I have a terrible memory so I won’t attempt to list out people I’ve met last year, but please know you are appreciated. Moving to college has been such a huge change (& challenge, with all the treatment I’ve had to do) but the literary community I’ve found has been absolutely lifesaving :)
I am not the best at twitter, so I’m hoping that over the course of this year I get to connect with you all on here & maybe instagram as an alternative. Anyway, I promised recs, so here are some of the best essays of the year (to me):
Blunt Force Ethnic Credibility
When people say the X community, I wonder whether they just mean some X people I know and refuse to say that because it sounds sillier to extrapolate uniform feeling from the latter, as there’s no X convention where everyone votes on a slate of propositions. I feel no allegiance toward Vietnamese, Vietnamese(-)American, Asian, or Asian(-)American “communities” because no such things can be composed of millions of individuals without interpersonal relationships.
One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps
Two decades earlier, after returning to Urumqi from Beijing, I had started working as a teacher. Kamil, who was already working at the research institute, told me of a six-volume set of Chinese-language books in the institute’s library. Intended for internal circulation only, the mimeographed books were titled Studies on Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism. They had been compiled to help “purge the poison” of so-called Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism from the Uyghur region, and to assist in the struggle against “ethnic separatism.” Two of the volumes were translations of foreign scholars’ writings. The government permitted only select researchers and officials to view such books and materials. I was very eager to see them. At my request, Kamil borrowed those two volumes from the library and lent them to me. After I finished reading them, though, I forgot to return the books.
…
There were whispers of Uyghur intellectuals being taken one after another. It was impossible, though, to know what was true and what wasn’t. Whenever we heard that someone had been detained, we would wonder about the reason. But each time we asked the question, we realized immediately how absurd it was. We knew very well that the majority of alleged crimes were mere excuses to arrest people. We were all constantly aware that we could be taken for no reason at all.
With everyone smoking, the one-room store grew hazy, and every little while we would open the door to air it out. Afraid that passersby would overhear us, we always quickly pulled the door closed again. If a customer walked inside, we would halt our conversation until they left.
A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women
The motivations of men who commit mass shootings are often muddled, complex or unknown. But one common thread that connects many of them — other than access to powerful firearms — is a history of hating women, assaulting wives, girlfriends and female family members, or sharing misogynistic views online, researchers say.
As the nation grapples with last weekend’s mass shootings and debates new red-flag laws and tighter background checks, some gun control advocates say the role of misogyny in these attacks should be considered in efforts to prevent them.
The fact that mass shootings are almost exclusively perpetrated by men is “missing from the national conversation,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Monday. “Why does it have to be, why is it men, dominantly, always?”
The Foster Sister I Never Knew (yes this is Flat Ink promotion shush)
As my mother now tells the story, “We did everything in our power to keep her.” But the laws of New York did not allow them to take her out of the state. They hadn’t realized that when they took her to visit my mother’s parents in Wisconsin. They didn’t know they were breaking the law on the fateful day when they drove out to Connecticut to discover the Stone of Destiny. There were no consequences or even warnings until they informed the social worker they were moving.
“We tried to adopt her,” my mother repeats. But Josie’s mother refused.
“We’d already started building the house,” my mother says, fingering the photographs of Josie and Marc playing on the slope of rock that now frames the hearth beside us.
Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society
The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.
Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.
This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.
^ This article about the English industry totally doesn’t reflect our literary community, what do you mean haha. Anyway.
More to come :) Hopefully you’ll subscribe to see it!