Roam with me
We’ll hang out in Shanghai, drop by the Medicis in Florence, visit Beijing in the grip of SARS.
The poet Anne Carson said that in writing she is “really trying to make people’s minds move”, ideally somewhere their mind has never moved before. That’s a tall order, but writing, at its best, can do that. It can jolt us into shifting our perspective, and it’s this reframing of reality that gives literature such power. As readers and writers, we often forget this power, we focus on the entertainment quality, the acrobatics of language and form. Mario Vargas Llosa reminds us that in totalitarian societies, literature is a vehicle for protest. It acquires a dangerous, threatening quality, because it subverts the official narrative of those in power by asking controversial questions, giving expression to individual thought, and offering an alternative narrative.
Most of the time, as writers, we’re thrilled if we can just pull off the entertaining part. That’s really what I am setting out to do here with Fiction Snack, an old newsletter that I am reviving after a long break from writing. I’ll share bits of fiction to savor with your coffee, excerpts from stories, novels, work in progress, the stories behind the stories.
My writing draws on my multilingualism, my immigrant perspective, the places I’ve lived and worked in, the people I’ve met along the way, who stuck with me, some stranger than fiction, and who found their way - alchemized - onto the page. It’s an invitation to get out of your head, to roam with me. We’ll hang out in Shanghai, visit the Medici court in Florence, experience Beijing in the grip of SARS. And if we’re lucky, along the way, I’ll be able to move your mind just a bit.
Thank you for reading, nothing is more valuable to us writers than readers.
Happy holidays!
- Vanessa