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INTRODUCTION BY ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG
ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays and The Border of Paradise: A Novel. She received the Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco, where she is working on her second novel.
I was a magician’s assistant in the early 1990s. The magician, named Cameron, thought himself a David-Copperfield-in-training. For the grand finale of his act, he was chained up in a trunk while I climbed atop it with a velvet throw to exchange places with him at a toss of the cloth. Because I’d signed a nondisclosure agreement, I never told my family how the trick was achieved, though they harassed me for years to confess.
Done well, writing is one of the most genuinely mysterious things that we will ever do. If we are lucky, we will take amorphous and confusing aspects of our lives and of our imaginations, and we will commit them to paper with enough nuance to transmit them into the minds of others. In this way, writing is like telepathy, or the genuine iteration of a magic trick, except that it is I who have seemingly pulled a card at random, and you, the viewer, who will tell me what I’ve drawn.
So often writers are asked, at readings and in interviews, why it is that we write. Flannery O’Connor famously said that she did it because she was good at it. I suspect that Joyce Carol Oates just can’t stop. I write in large part because I experience unusual mental states and hope to convey them to readers who have never experienced psychosis or PTSD. I write to tell the stories of my parents, who became foreigners in a country they never felt comfortable in for the children they did not yet have. I write because to make connections between ideas in my nonfiction, or to find my way to a new scene from a stuck place in my fiction, is pure magic, and because I love to surprise myself and to share that surprise.
The last four years, post-2016 election, have been increasingly frightening to marginalized communities, who have found our already fragile rights eroding. So many of us have turned to one another with question marks in our faces: what do we do now? How do we continue to write? Is writing even important in times like these, when the climate crisis is upon us, and hatred seems to have such intense power?
To me, the answer is: yes, and perhaps more than ever. I am dazed by and grateful for the winners within this chapbook. Their writing, I believe, is indestructible in a way that an illusion can never be— because its power does not hinge upon a single secret. Instead of falling apart under scrutiny, the work blossoms. We marvel at the beauty of it, the clarity and the miracle of it. These thoughts and images open up the world.
