Month: October 2020

New Piece “Greening” at Tiny Molecules

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

I have a new piece up at Tiny Molecules called “Greening,” which is the first in a series of pieces investigating and exploring my lifetime obsession with the Statue of Liberty. A huge thanks to Kelsey Ipsen at Tiny Molecules for believing in it and being wonderful to work with!

Now here she is again, definitive as a door. She wants to turn into metal, or me, and all I can do is green all the time. And so I green to her: When were you something no one expected you to be. Which is to say I greened to myself.

When I was writing and revising this piece, the wanting and the yearning was so present in me. Perhaps this is a result of the loneliness embodied by the pandemic and the tragedies of 2020. Or perhaps it is something else. I remember making a list to myself of “what I wanted” from this piece — a list for the reader as much as for the writer. The list went on: I want this piece to transport the reader to Liberty Island, neck craned looking up. I want immediacy, obsession, and awe to be in every line. I want this piece to be tactile even without the characters touching each other. I want to write with an honor, a reverence for both the statue as statue and the statue as woman. I want the pleasure and the nerves. I want to write a queer ode to a statue who might be the most living and mysterious thing I’ve ever known. I want to write something that inherently has secrets and layers and things unsaid. I want this piece to be about the self unknown, the discovering self, the self that is striving to become something they’ve always longed to be. 

I think about the millions of people over centuries who have seen the Statue of Liberty as a paragon of freedom. Who have found salvation from this woman. And how I too have found life and wonder and hope in her. I recognize that I’m not coming to her as a refugee or an immigrant. I’m coming to her from some other place. I’m looking for a different kind of answer from her. “Greening,” to me, is a search, a fantasy, an alchemy. Or simply put, a love letter.

I hope this piece allows you to green, too, if you need it.

Wisdom from Writers: A Conversation with Jihyun Yun

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

In the collection, the mouths of the three main speakers struggle to articulate a kinder world still unfathomable to them, in efforts to forge a path there. Articulation is conjuring. I believe it’s the realest magic our bodies are capable of.

I recently talked with poet Jihyun Yun about her prize-winning debut poetry collection, Some are Always Hungry; the mouth as metaphor; a few favorite Korean fairy tales; and the ways in which language connects food, women, and violence. You can read the full interview here on The Rumpus.

I do find it very troubling in itself that it’s easier to imagine the female body as food, as something hunted, as prey, but I think it’s also speaking to a truth of how language, too, can be a knife, and how it is often brandished.

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Find out more about Jihyun Yun on jihyunyun.com. Jihyun’s book Some are Always Hungry (September 2020) is available from University of Nebraska Press.