Every year, PEN America releases an anthology of the best short stories written by first time published writers. This year, a dozen writers were selected from a wide-ranging array of literary journals – both in print and online. They were judged and selected by Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz.
You can read previous roundtables featuring writers from past collections here: 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.
This year, four writers participated in the round table:
- Dailihana E. Alfonseca (“Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother” from Driftwood Press)
- Stephenjohn Holgate (“Delroy and the Boys” from West Trade Review)
- Mengyin Lin (“Magic, or Something Less Assuring” from Epihany)
- Jo Saleska (“Acts of Creation” from Peatsmoke Journal)
- Lisa Wartenberg Vélez (“What is Ours” from Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry)
- Patrick J. Zhou (“Taidu” from Carve Magazine)
You can purchase a copy of the anthology here.
Can you introduce readers to who you are as a writer and what interests and informs your writing?
Mengyin Lin: I was born and raised in Beijing, China. Mandarin is my mother tongue and I write in English as my second language. I hope the language in my fiction is shaped by this personal history, my English punctured or mutated by Chinese as a language, a culture, and perhaps, at times, a way of seeing and thinking about the world, both real and fictional. I am new to fiction writing and still in a learning and exploratory phase (but maybe writing fiction is perennially exploratory? which would be so cool). Since I started writing, I’ve been interested in experimenting with form (in particular point of view, time, voice, and hopefully more in the future) in a way that is not detached from content, rather integral to the piece as a whole. Form is content and content is form, if that makes sense.
In terms of interests and inspirations, it is really difficult to name. I do believe the personal is the political. And I find everything and everyone interesting, truly! Sometimes it’s a problem.
Stephenjohn Holgate: I suppose I’m a voice driven writer; I struggle to write in anything but the first person. This may be because of my background as an actor, a profession I worked in for a number of years. I find it easier to slip into a particular style of writing that mimics speech, something idiosyncratic and personal, rather than the third person, which feels a bit removed and arch for me. I prefer something flawed that can’t know everything. As a person who was born in Jamaica, completed high school in South Florida, lived in London for over twenty years and now finds himself in the land of the long white cloud (Aotearoa New Zealand), I’m interested in issues around identity, migration, generational conflict. All that fun stuff. And jokes. I like jokes.
Jo Saleska: One of the characters in my story “Acts of Creation” says she doesn’t “believe art should behave in expected ways,” and I sort of feel the same way about fiction. I love reading stories that swerve and spellbind my imagination, shatter rules, send my soul into the stratosphere—the kinds of stories that make me go, I didn’t know a story could even do that. I desperately want to write those kinds of stories.
Someone once described my writing as “fabulistic.” I don’t really know what that means, but I like the word! I tend to incorporate elements of fairy tale, surrealism, and dark humor into my work. I’m usually a bit surprised by the themes that emerge in my stories, but I think lately I’ve been dwelling a lot on the inherent strangeness of inhabiting a female body, mothering, and experiencing religion and spirituality as a woman.
I write all my first drafts (and sometimes second drafts) longhand, which I’ve been told is weird, and I really enjoy writing nature descriptions whether they serve the piece or not—can’t stop, won’t stop.
Patrick J. Zhou: I’m still figuring that out for myself—what style is distinctly my own, what stories can I effectively tell. I still have a lot to learn. What kind of writer am I? I’ll have to keep writing and see. This honor affirmed for me that investing in that answer just might be worth it.
As far as interests, I find myself writing a lot about complex family dynamics, immigrant experiences, Chinese-Americanness, gender and power dynamics, and American church/theology. Something unexpected is that I’ve written a few stories where characters vomit and a few stories with cannibal-adjacent content. I don’t know how that happened but now I’m kind of hungry.
As far as writers I admire, Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson were my first loves when it comes to short stories. Lately, I’ve enjoyed work by Nana Kwame Adjeii-Brenyah, Deesha Philyaw, and Weike Wang.
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez: The magnetic core of my work pulls at monstrosity, sensuality, and liminality. I am interested in visibility and erasure, as it relates to sexual, racial, or ethnic identity––as a cis queer woman, as a white-passing Colombian from lines of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, as a new mother, and as a person married to a cishet man. Not surprisingly, I tend to write towards diasporic identities, about people never truly at home anywhere. My work also takes interest in strangeness, the natural world, and environmental cataclysm.
In style, my writing is lyrical, maximalist, a bit Gothic, at times speculative, and tends towards the associative. I am interested in the stories bodies tell and how and where trauma writes itself on the body. I aim for propulsive writing and revise with my ear––there is a cadence and a movement towards which I work––alongside the requisite elements of form and content.
I see my work in conversation with fairy tales, mythology, and other received narratives. It is informed by the work of so many––too many to name––but I hold Toni Morrison’s as a perennial favorite. Beyond that, lyrics, poetry, theatre — I find inspiration in a lot of things.
Dailihana E. Alfonseca: I am a little all over the place as a writer. I am someone who writes about legacy and history and heavily researched facts that allow me to reflect on life and its echoes. These are my main sources of information, these are the things that help me mold my experiential knowledge into tangibly accessible poems and stories.
What is your writing background?
Patrick J. Zhou: I love my day job but I don’t deploy this brand of creativity there. Words like “utilize” or “cost-benefit” or “roles and responsibilities” make routine appearances in my documents. Every now and then though, I’m a real bad-boy-creative-rebel-type and add a picture of Tom Hanks to a Powerpoint or sneak in a really zany font like Arial Narrow.
Regarding formal training, I don’t have much, save for a few workshops in local bookstores/art-centers and two online Catapult courses. My two writing clubs fizzled out in a year and I’m not very active on social media so writing can feel like a lonely enterprise for this staid civil servant.
But, in the words of Anton Ego, esteemed food critic from Disney’s Ratatouille, “a great artist can come from anywhere.” In other words, my most ambitious dream is to be a sewer rat.
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez: I always wrote growing up but somewhere along the way someone told me that wasn’t a career path, so I decided to do theatre instead, which––boy, how that seemed less daunting, I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted it less.
After doing theatre for a really long time, I finally decided to take fiction workshops and luckily found a fantastic organization in Houston that offered those––Inprint. I took several classes there throughout the years, and began to build community––alongside courage. Eventually I made the decision to apply for grad school in creative writing. I graduated with my MFA in Fiction this past May from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing program. In a serendipitous turn of events, Inprint helped fund some of my studies through one of the fellowships they offer at UH. Alongside that, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend conferences and workshops like Tin House, Kenyon Writers’ Workshops, and Bread Loaf as well as a residency at Ucross.
Dailihana E. Alfonseca: I have always only written in this style for myself and primarily considered myself a reader, not a writer. When I first started writing I was returning to school to become a tween horror writer. It just so happened that this kind of writing came naturally to me, and when given the opportunity my personal agency flourished when nourished.
Mengyin Lin: I studied Film in college. Until three years ago, I only wrote screenplays for film and television, and mostly in Chinese. I always loved reading fiction but cinema was what first made me want to create and inspired me to think of myself as a storyteller, an artist even. The language of film, namely sight and sound, as well as the negation of them–what we cannot see or hear, such as darkness and silence and the unsaid and empty space and what happens behind a half-closed door, is not easy to be translated into fiction, but I try.
I started writing fiction in the pandemic and went to Brooklyn College’s MFA program from 2021 to 2023, where I learned everything I know about fiction writing from my brilliant teachers and cohort.
Jo Saleska: I was very lonely in high school (weren’t we all, though?), and I started writing seriously then, but I kept it a secret. I felt like if I told anyone I was writing, a spell would break or something, and I’d have to stop. In retrospect, I was just afraid of criticism. I outlined two angsty young adult novels and wrote a handful of short stories that I sent off to Seventeen Magazine, which used to hold an annual short fiction contest. Spoiler alert: I didn’t win.
I continued writing through college, but I started developing writing anxiety my senior year. I majored in English, and immersing myself in great literature made me extremely self-conscious about my own work: what could I possibly contribute? I remember finishing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and just being like, “What is even the point of trying?!”
I went on to earn a master’s degree in rhetoric and composition, worked for a long time as an academic writing coach and instructor, and stopped writing fiction altogether. A few years ago, though, the itch to write stories nagged and nagged and nagged. Trying to write creatively again after stopping for so many years was painful, and I am still working through my writing anxiety—I probably always will to some degree. Enrolling in a low-pressure MFA program and surrounding myself with a supportive writing community has helped a lot, though.
Stephenjohn Holgate: I don’t know if I have one. I have an English degree, which nearly killed off any attempt to write, if that counts. I’m a recent returnee to this particular practice, I started writing again after a twenty year hiatus. I then submitted some of my work to Writing West Midlands, a lovely organisation that does a lot of good work in the West Midlands, UK and became a member of their Room 204 writer development programme. That’s the closest I’ve made it to a writing Masters or MFA.
How did this story come to be? What was the process behind it?
Stephenjohn Holgate: It came out a collision of reading Sam Selvon’s London novels (The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending, The Housing Lark, Moses Returning) and thinking about how rich the language of mid century West Indian migration was in those bits of writing, but also how distinctly Trinidadian they sounded. I wanted to explore something with a more Jamaican cadence. At the same time I was stuck at home, as we all were, and I needed an outlet. I was playing a fair bit of Capoeira music, mainly the berimbau, but also the atabaque, and thinking about a chance meeting I had had with a mento musician, Joseph ‘Powda’ Bennett, years before. The story is a happy collision of these things.
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez: I took some cues from real-life events covered in the Colombian press several years back, but the story is otherwise the product of a lot of rewrites. I knew I wanted to play with fairy tales, but kept inventing ones for this piece, and it just wasn’t quite working. At one point, there was a story about an octopus. A full rewrite revealed to me why – the story grapples with received narratives, learned truisms. So instead of inventing, I revisited stories I was told as a girl and Little Red Riding Hood came to mind. Then I knew that if I wasn’t explicit in stating that the first-person narrator wasn’t supposed to easily slip into the role of the girl in the fairy tale, people would assume such — and that wasn’t quite right. Once I started tinkering with all of that, the story really took off.
Dailihana E. Alfonseca: The story began as an exploration outside of my comfort zone. A sharing of personal writing within a space meant for whimsy (thanks to Dr. Landon Houle). I was working through my own assimilative traumas, and learning to process the death of my mother, who did die of a brain tumor when I was 17, around the same time I had a assignment due for my first creative writing class. The first line was a rhythm in my head for days before I finally put pen to paper. It grew from there. I wanted to write about what I knew, but also share what I had heard from other immigrant women throughout my life. Stories, legends, and myths of abuse, and exploitation, and marginalized lives which I have carried for years like a vault in waiting, a time capsule.
Jo Saleska: I wrote the first draft of this story in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia. The earliest version was very weird and involved a newlywed couple who receive a live garden gnome in the mail and ultimately decide to behead it by the end of the story. I liked the absurdity and strangeness of the piece, and I felt like the voice of the narrator was strong—but I couldn’t figure out how to make it into a story. The writing was compelling, but it didn’t really make any sense, and it wasn’t about anything. I revised it dozens of times, workshopped it during my MFA program, revised it five more times, and sent it out to journals. But it never got picked up. I put it away for a year. Then I got pregnant, and then COVID-19 happened, and I picked the story back up and started incorporating some of my thoughts and experiences during that strange and frightening time. At that point, things started clicking together in a way that finally made the story work.
Mengyin Lin: I described details of the this story’s origin in an interview with Epiphany, the magazine who originally published this story, for which I will forever be grateful for, and in the interview that PEN America kindly did of each winner this year. So I don’t want to repeat myself too much here. I’d be so humbled should anyone be interested in reading those.
For the readers of Debutiful, I’d like to add something that is, I hope, interesting or helpful to hear. “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” was the fourth short story I’d ever written in my life, but it was the first story that I felt, rather magically, wrote itself. Before that, I, too, had heard other writers talk about their process in this mystifying way and never really believed or understood them. And now I feel a little sorry and embarrassed that this is all I can offer about the creative process, perpetuating that mystery. But I think it’s just a different way of saying that the writer found the right idea, the right characters, the right perspectives, the right voice, the right beginning and the right ending. It doesn’t always happen right away and could take many years and drafts, but I believe that every writer instinctually knows when they find the one. Now it sounds like finding true love (if you’re a believer). Well, perhaps the creative process is as enigmatic as love.
All of this is in no way saying that this story is great. It was, though, the best I could do as a writer at that point in time.
Patrick J. Zhou: Here’s something that really happened: a few months ago, my parents–American citizens for three decades who immigrated from mainland China in the late 80s–were on vacation in Iceland when a woman from California in their tour group approached my mother with a confession: earlier on the tour, upon hearing that another member of the group was Taiwanese, the Californian had approached the Taiwanese woman, unprompted, and told her she enthusiastically supported Taiwan’s independence. The Taiwanese woman just smiled and walked away without a word, leaving the Californian confused and embarrassed. For some reason, perhaps having heard my mother speak English, she then sought clarity (?), consolation (?), absolution (?), for this apparent indiscretion (?), offense (?), from my mother.
No notes. It’s a perfect scene. I thought to myself, I should turn this into a story, and then realized, oh, right.
Tàidù was the result of seeing similar, less dramatic scenes play out when I’ve traveled except I wanted to put my own hyper-critical natural disposition on trial and to see what readers, my invisible jury, would respond.
What can we expect from you in the future?
Jo Saleska: I’m working on a collection of short stories about the bizarre and surreal realm of motherhood. I also have a rough outline for a novel, but I still need to muster up the courage to start writing the thing.
Stephenjohn Holgate: and immigration and dealing with the burden of the past. There’s a also another nascent novel which I’m twenty thousand words into; all the same sort of subjects. I’ll probably mine these areas until I’ve worn myself out. It could take some time. I’ve also just moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, so I’m trying to find my feet there. Who knows what will come from moving to this entirely different landscape? Hopefully something interesting.
Patrick J. Zhou: Who knows. I’d love to publish a short story collection down the road. In the meantime, my next published story will appear in the minnesota review next year and I’m currently submitting some flash pieces that pay homage to my more gothic influences.
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez: I am working on a novel set in a reimagined Old West, as well as a short story collection. Hopefully those will make their way out into the world some day — but still have a lot of work to do.
Dailihana E. Alfonseca: Currently, I am working on simultaneous projects, but my next short story is already in the works. It picks up where Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother leaves off and will highlight how music influences personal relationships and how parental legacies influence the we view romance. In the future, however, I hope to write many more stories and many more poems that help the un-seen be seen, and the forgotten to be remembered.
Mengyin Lin: I am finishing up my short story collection manuscript, currently titled The Memory Museum. “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” will be in the collection, along with nine other stories. I hope I will be able to share this book with the world soon.
I also recently started a novel set in a Beijing high school in the late aughts, a very different time in China. I have so little of it figured out that the experience of writing it vacillates between absolute excitement and absolute horror.