![]() ![]() I just submitted what I had to the Octopus Books contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. I never really shared it with anyone I never really took any classes or studied it. ![]() ![]() Jenny Zhang: I wrote these stories in my undergraduate and graduate years, but even then I started writing poetry on the side, to give myself an opportunity to make something that wasn’t immediately going to be consumed and commented on. Were you writing fiction all the while you were publishing and performing your poems? ![]() Monika Zaleska: You attended to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a fiction student, but many people know you first as an essayist and poet. I’ve been an avid reader of Zhang’s writing since our days as staff writers for Rookie Magazine, and I was grateful to speak with her about how she takes her own experiences as a young girl, and immigrant, and spins them into tall tales, stories-the stuff of dreams-and nightmares. These are coming of age stories, but also narratives of how history, poverty, race, and class affect whole families and communities, told retrospectively through the voices of the women these girls will one day become. Zhang’s narrators are young Chinese girls navigating home and school as new immigrants in 90s New York. Jenny Zhang is a writer, poet, and essayist whose debut collection of stories, Sour Heart, is the first book out from Lena Dunham’s Lenny imprint at Random House. ![]()
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