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“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情。这个名单越来越长啦，敬请期待，漏网之鱼也欢迎在后台和我们取得联系！
Five Questions with Yuxi LinAccent: Why do you write in English?Lin Yuxi: To be honest, I’m afraid of writing in Chinese. It was the language of my much-younger self, and I’m not sure what she would say to the page. I have not fully accepted that child and integrated her into my adult psyche. In a way, when I moved to the US at the age of 12, my girl-self was split off and tucked away. Writing in English is easier because it provides a kind of buffer and distance. If I were to write in Chinese, I’d have to reckon with parts of my immigrant past, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. On the other hand, one grows by leaning into one’s fear. Maybe one day I will do it. A: What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?L: I treasured my time in the MFA. It felt magical being in the same room with people who loved the craft of poetry just as fiercely as I did. Being in weekly workshops was very hard at first. I was so new to the poetry world, and I’d had no publications. My first year was lonely, but then I found people whose aesthetics matched mine. Constantly reading other people’s work eventually helped me to trust my own voice. I also took classes with some of my poetry heroes whose work has saved me and whose teachings have stayed with me. From Sharon Olds I learned to be kind to my poems; from Anne Carson, I learned to appreciate the freedom of playing within constraints; from Deborah Landau, I learned how a poetry manuscript is put together; from Ed Hirsch, I learned to read international poets; from Matt Rohrer I learned how to be a good reader; from Terrance Hayes, I learned to experiment with form; from Megan O’Rourke I learned to value simplicity, and from Rowan Ricardo Phillips I learned to examine the etymology of words I use. These people changed my life. A: What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing? L：During quarantine, I taught myself how to read Tarot cards using The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin. Tarot is a tool for storytelling and making sense of events happening in my life and the world at large. It helps me observe patterns of behavior and interpret confusing events. I also consider my job as an English teacher a creative practice. Teaching is similar to writing in that I have to get information from my brain to other brains and help them make sense of it, and the way we make sense of things is through storytelling. A：Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.L：I absolutely adored Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It’s beautifully translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The book defies easy categorization, straddling the genres of mystery, detective, and environmental fiction. The female protagonist is an aging astrologer in a remote village, and she recounts a series of deaths of hunters. I couldn’t put down the book, not because I wanted to find out the “whodunit,” but rather because the voice is so uncanny and compelling. I wrote down my favorite lines. Here’s one: “The thing that leaves the body sucks a piece of the world after it, and no matter how good or bad it was, how guilty or blameless, it leaves behind a great void.” How stunning is that! I’m also a huge fan of art museums. Last weekend I went to Dia Beacon and experienced Carl Craig’s sound installation, Party/After-Party. It was eerie at first, walking into a dark industrial basement pumping techno. It felt like a post-apocalyptic bunker, which frightened me given the current pandemic, but then as more people walked into the room, we all started to dance. It was a magical moment. A：Share with us some gossip about your writing community.L：Everyone is an anxious wreck at least part of the time. Our minds and bodies react in vastly different ways to crises. I couldn’t write anything for the first couple of months of quarantine. I was hiding in my tiny apartment in New York and listening to sirens go by every hour. Then last week I read The New York Times interview with Louise Gück the day after she won the Nobel Prize, and she said that she couldn’t write anything either for a while. We need to give ourselves lots of grace. On the other hand, I know some writers who have found the isolation to be incredibly productive and generative, and they were able to find solace in creative work. However, your creative process has reacted to the pandemic that is legitimate. Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American writer and 2019 AAWW Margins Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University. You can read more of her work at yuxi-lin.com.
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