Author: Shyla Shehan

Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her literary/visual art has appeared in nearly a hundred publications. She loves to dance. Her flash piece, Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire, appears in Issue #19.

Tell us about yourself.

I always struggle when asked to describe myself in only a few short sentences. People are so complex! Where to even begin? I guess the most important thing to know about me is that I love to dance. In my opinion, it’s the most instinctive creative activity. Rarely do I find myself overthinking when I improv or freestyle. Instead, I simply let the music guide my body. It’s liberating! It also motivates me to keep going when I’m having a rough time.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

It probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I originally wrote this piece for Taco Bell Quarterly. Literary rejections typically don’t bother me at all, but I’ll admit to being kind of crushed when my dream journal ultimately passed. I am, however, thrilled that the story eventually found a perfect home at The Good Life Review, another publication I’ve long admired.

In terms of process, I had the most fun writing the robot deterrent math question because I’ve always thought the word problems on algebra tests introduced the most ridiculous scenarios that no real person would ever find themselves in, so I relished putting my own humorous-but-heartbreaking spin on it. Drafting the entire piece was an endlessly entertaining adventure though. I love playing with hermit crab forms, and blending a customer service survey with a school exam felt very natural and satisfying.

What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?

I wrote a lot of silly stories as a kid but stopped as I got older because I thought I wanted to be a “serious” writer. In grad school, I slowly began returning back to humor (or at least absurdity), but this is probably one of the most overtly comedic pieces I’ve written. I had such a blast remixing pop culture nostalgia within a post-apocalyptic landscape that I’m now writing a futuristic murder mystery comedy novel set inside the film industry.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I never write anything hoping to elicit a certain reaction or emotion. That’s not why I make art. And once something is published, I no longer have control over the response. But even though this piece is based on my own personal memories, experiences, and obsessions, I do hope that other people will find it relatable in some visceral way. Maybe it will make them nostalgic. Maybe it’ll make them laugh. Maybe it’ll make them sweat. Maybe it’ll make them hungry. Or sad. Or angry. Maybe even all those things at once? That’s up to the individual reader.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I write (and create) for many reasons. My motivation differs depending on the project. On the most basic level, however, I’m most likely trying to externalize or immortalize a story, character, relationship, image, or mood. Some of my biggest influences are science, everyday objects, or other art forms. I’m as inspired by clocks, clouds, nightmares, and architecture, as I am by cinematography, choreography, fashion, and synth music. You can find structure in the most unexpected ingredients.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

I have my laptop programmed to say, “It’s ## o’clock. Time for a dance break,” at the top of every hour. And then I take a dance break! I will dance to anything and everything. Different music genres help me access and express different emotions, so I never feel bored.

Summoning the mental energy required to write can unfortunately be more difficult, especially when I’m not feeling well. I try not to be too hard on myself if I don’t write regularly. My body knows its limits, so I’ve learned to listen to it. When I was younger, I used to get so upset when I didn’t live up to my own high expectations. I thought laziness must be to blame when the truth was I had unresolved trauma and an undiagnosed chronic illness. If there are words I absolutely must get on the page, I’m sure I’ll find a way to get them there. In the meantime, even when my pen is not physically moving, worlds are still being constructed inside my head. I know now that writing for the sake of filling a quota is not always a good use of my time.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

To be honest, I’ve never put much thought into what other people meant when they said those words. In my youth, I didn’t really understand the phrase. But after surviving multiple health scares in the past five years, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering my mortality. I suppose for me “the good life” has become synonymous with life in general. The life I’ve lived. When you’re really going through it, so much of life feels terrible, but then you look back and realize how much the ugly parts shaped you as a human being and as an artist.

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Thank you, Susan, for trusting us with your quirky flash piece (we are also TBQ fans, but glad it worked out the way it did)! We appreciate you being a part of our growing literary community and also for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best with writing, dancing, and whatever else strikes your fancy!

Keira Deer is a writer and poet based in Southern California. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University, and her work has been published in Scapegoat Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others, and her poem, “if,” is featured in Issue #19.

Tell us about yourself.

I’ve always been fond of thinking about poetry as a way of telling secrets, a form of storytelling I’ve been practicing since I was a young teenager and now into my early twenties. My poetry draws its subject matter largely from my own life and experiences, focusing often on themes of voicelessness, coming of age, and memory, but I’m also passionate about writing poems that unveil stories from history, particularly narratives of minority voices and groups that have been overshadowed or erased in the course of mainstream American history. In synthesis of the personal and the historical, I find myself drawn toward poetic explorations of Asian-American—specifically Chinese-American—history in the U.S. I’m also interested in using poetry as a way of parsing the confusion and complexities of biraciality.

I hold a BFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University in Orange County, California, where I was born and raised, and will be pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in the same field at CU Boulder this fall.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

The poem that appears in this issue is a playful speculation of what alternate reality might exist if John Lennon had not been assassinated. The poem considers where the rock star might be and what he might be doing if he had lived beyond 1980, musing on his creation of new music, his continued career in the arts, and his favored walks through Central Park. While I don’t remember where the initial idea for the poem came from, I do recall how liberating it felt to imagine an extension of John Lennon’s life, how it gave me the freedom to bend the lines and march my own footprints in the margins of history. Even the fact that I’ve never been to New York did very little to restrict me, because I was writing about a New York that doesn’t really exist—I was beyond the realms of reality and therefore had the liberty to play and experiment.

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I titled the poem “if” as an encouragement for readers to invite wonder into their own lives. By asking “if,” you’re really asking yourself to imagine a catalog of possibilities, a set of potentials that exercises your mind, your creativity, and your ability to dream. Ultimately, I think, half the work of an artist is to imagine all that is possible (and impossible) and then to realize it.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I’ve operated my entire life as a notoriously quiet person, both literally—sometimes, my voice so quiet I’m asked to speak up four or five times before the ear can catch it—and personality-wise. For that reason, the feeling of voicelessness (and, by extension, a certain kind of invisibility and smallness) is one that I’ve always struggled with. Something that holds me so tightly in the fist of writing is the even ground that my voice finds on the page, the fact that I can tell everything I need to—all the truths, all the secrets—and be heard without even having to open my mouth. I get this unbeatable feeling when I’m able to write something that feels like Morse code tapped right out of my heartbeat, something that expresses exactly what I felt, saw, experienced, etc. and manages to transfer those sensations to the reader in a meaningful way.

At some point, I realized: if I could raise my own voice in this way, I could do the same for those who weren’t able to themselves. From there, I started writing poems centering around Chinese immigrants in the United States who experienced racism and brutality in the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act and beyond. My love of history and my love of poetry mutually inform each other and synthesize into creative projects that make me feel deeply fulfilled as an artist.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

I journal a lot—every day, when possible. Any night available to me to stay up until midnight (and beyond) is spent in bed with my laptop and several books of poetry open and haphazard around me at arms reach. The poems come in pieces. I try to add one piece to the puzzle every day, even if just a line.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about “the good life” lately, and the word that always comes to mind is “explore.” Find what interests you and do many things. Remember the catalog of possibilities you create for yourself and be willing to try your hand at each of them. Be a lifelong learner. Make mistakes and become better because of them. “Be like the fox,” writes Wendell Berry, “who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.”

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Thank you, Keira, for being a part of our growing literary community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best with writing and all life’s endeavors!

Sara Maria Hasbun is an American linguist, currently based in Beijing. You can find her on instagram, @misslinguistic. Her short fiction, Tbilisi, appears in our spring issue.

Tell us about yourself. 

Before I started writing fiction, my background was in linguistics. I’ve always been fascinated with the very different ways that languages describe and categorize the world, and as a college student I set for myself the impractical goal of learning the five languages of the UN (Spanish, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Arabic). I liked the fact that they mostly came from such distinct language families, and yet would also give me access to such a large swathe of the world. I didn’t learn all those languages to fluency, but learning their structures really did open my eyes to new ways of thinking.

That led me, for awhile, into working as a translator. Later I started a consultancy. My work has almost always been remote, so I was very lucky to spend extensive time living abroad. 

I only recently started writing fiction, and I think the main impetus for that was feeling like I was having trouble processing reality. I was living in China during the pandemic, I was reading Chinese news and American news and European news and feeling like the more I read, the less I actually understood. I was also living in a small, tight-knit community of foreigners and locals, wonderful people who I love fiercely. But everyone in that small community knew a little too much about everyone else, or worse, operated under the dangerous assumption that they did. I started to realize just how easy it was to subvert reality, to invite delusion.

You would think that would lead me towards surrealist fiction or magical realism, but I find reality even more insidious and confusing, so I’m sticking with literary fiction for now.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

I have this habit of falling in love with cities, especially cities that feel like they’re on a precipice, cities that are about to cross a threshold. That sort of precipitous change seems to turn all inhabitants into thinkers. In those kinds of cities, very few residents have the luxury of being complacent or incurious. So if you turn up in a city like Tbilisi or Beijing, you are immediately thrown into a conversation. Everyone is asking big questions. It feels almost impossible to end your day without feeling like you’ve learned something new about humanity.

In Tbilisi, during the times that I visited, everyone was asking big questions. What is a nation? they asked. What is sovereignty? What does it mean to be accountable to your country? What does it mean to be accountable to the people that you love?

What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?

To be honest, I was stuck on this piece for a very long time. The current Georgian situation (their nation, their culture, their history, their conflicts, their identity) is incredibly complex, and I really did not want the piece to sound like it came with a political agenda. 

And as with many other subjects, I felt like the more I learned about Georgia, the less I actually knew. 

But of course, when a person describes their experience of moving through life, their observations will naturally coalesce around one interpretation or another. To deny that would be unrealistic. 

Eventually I realized that I needed to lean, as I always should do, into that uncertainty, and bring the reader along as I try to piece things together. I tried very hard to write only what I saw and heard, and to avoid drawing conclusions. 

What do you hope readers take from the piece?

I want to bring the reader into the process of trying to figure out the world, I want them to question what they thought they knew to be true about themselves and their surroundings. Whenever I write, what I want more than anything is for the writing to bring about more questions.

I hope this piece encourages readers to think about their own relationship to accountability: who are they accountable to? What does accountability look like? And in a world where your country asks so much of you, how important is it to protect yourself?

Mostly, I hope it inspires readers to hold some empathy for people who are still figuring all of that out.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?

Right now I’m fueled by confusion. So much about the world confuses me these days, and I write to try to make some sense of things. I really enjoy this process, I enjoy talking to friends about what I’m writing and what they are writing, and trying to come closer to some sort of understanding. I think you never actually reach fully reach an objective truth, but it is fun to help each other hold back the curtains, to try to get a glimpse.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

My favorite kind of day has me writing in the early afternoon. I “clock in” at one of my favorite Beijing cafes, I start writing, and then I pretty much blink and the sun has already gone down and my coffee is cold, and friends are sniffing around to see who will be the first to order a bottle of wine and ruin the rest of the day’s writing. It is truly a good life.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

The good life is full of more questions than answers, because no one wants to go to a dinner party and hear someone give you all the answers. The good life is sitting around with people whose company you enjoy, having some good food and some good drink, and trying to piece together an understanding of reality. Ideally one that leaves room for hope.

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Thank you, Sara, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. Best wishes with writing and wherever life and your travels take you next.

Allison Hughes lives on North Haven Island in Maine. She holds a BFA from Emerson College. Her work has been featured in Wack Mag.

Allison’s Essay, “I Am a Body Lying In the Grass” is featured in Issue #19.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Allison, a queer nonfiction writer from Maine. I’ve been writing about my life since First Grade. My teacher wrote weekly letters to all her students, and my first letter to her was about swimming at a sandy beach with my cousins in September. I still swim in September but now the beaches are rocky and my cousins live in different states. I live on North Haven Island with my partner and our pet fish named Henry, who has far outlived his life expectancy.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?

I wrote the bulk of this essay in the notes app on my phone when I was having trouble falling asleep.

What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?

I learned to use inspiration when it strikes.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?

Curiosity is one of my biggest influences. My desire to write is fueled by my desire to learn. It helps me feel my emotions and to understand situations or people from different angles. I love to write about my relationships, sexuality, family, and home.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

The outfit I choose to wear, the music I listen to, and the dinner I cook are all a part of my personal expression. These pieces of my life help fuel my creativity.

I find a balance between my writing and other responsibilities with the help from my community. I enjoy writing in the company of others, whether I’m in a packed coffee shop or sitting next to a friend. My friend calls it “parallel play.” She draws and I write or we both write or we both draw. I’m in a writing group that meets twice a month, since there aren’t many opportunities to sit in a packed coffee shop on the island. I value my relationships and try to connect with new writers.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

When I hear “the good life” I think of Maine. I think of my first cup of coffee of the day, reading on the beach, winter walks, falling asleep to the sound of waves crashing on shore. I think of falling in love and healing from heartbreak.

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Thank you, Allison, for being a part of our growing literary community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We wish you the best!