Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more!

Nicole Chung: Celeste, I have told you this so many times it must be getting old by now, but I absolutely loved your novel. My husband bought it for me, and then I bought it for half a dozen of my friends and relatives, and every single one of them sang its praises. My sister particularly enjoyed it; her exact words were: “Thank you. And damn you, too. By the end I was crying and slightly traumatized, but I loved it.”

How did the idea for this novel come to you? Was it difficult working on such a tragic story, and why did you decide to focus on such tough issues — misunderstanding and racism and unfulfilled dreams and the grief of losing a child?

Celeste Ng: Thank you! Both for the kind words and for sharing. The novel emerged, as most of my work does, when several seemingly unrelated things collided in my mind and I had to try and figure out why my mind was connecting them. My husband happened to tell me a story about his school days: when he was about 8, he was at a friend’s house when the friend pushed his own little sister into a pond in the backyard. She was pulled out immediately by her parents, but I kept thinking, what if they hadn’t been there? What was the relationship between this brother and sister like before he pushed her — and what was it like after?

I like talking with people who have changed religions. Here is one of them. 

Kima Jones is a poet and a book publicist in LA that I met through Roxane Gay at a reading about a year ago. She always wears the most incredible lipstick, and her writing gives me the shivers. I knew she’d become a Muslim as a young woman, and I’d also been giving a lot of thought to the process of religious conversion lately, so the idea of asking her to kick off the Convert Series seemed to follow naturally.

What was your religious background before your conversion? How old were you when you first started thinking about Islam?

I have been a God fearing person all of my life and cannot remember a time when God was not only a part of my life but the fiber of my home. In the bedroom where I slept as a child lived my grandfather’s ashes and the bible next to them, I’m guessing, as a way to watch over my brother and I. There were also the children’s bibles engraved in silver with each of our names when we were baptized and handed to us with care and concern and the expectation that we master the 23rd Psalm with haste and conviction.

Trailing clouds of glitter from a surprise Broadway triumph in Kenneth Lonergan’s serio-comedy This Is Our Youth, Rookie magazine founder Tavi Gevinson has expanded her extensive resume to include publishing maven. In addition to compiling the fourth Rookie Yearbook, due out this fall, Gevinson just made her debut as a literary editor. In the July/August issue of Poetry, the 103-year-old magazine that introduced American readers to the likes of Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gevinson curated and edited more than 50 pages of poems, prose and art, including a self-deprecating, funny, charming essay she wrote about her own evolution as a writer and a reader. She celebrates the kind of sincerity adults are taught to reject; her selections are optimistic, unironic, and downright joyful.

Gevinson and I talked on the phone about poetry, feelings, moving to New York, and her ever-evolving personal aesthetic—she is, after all, still 19.

Eugenia Williamson: In the essay you wrote in Poetry, you talk about the embarrassment you felt about liking Sylvia Plath when you were a young teenager and other ways poetry conjures embarrassment. Tell me more!

Tavi Gevinson: I wouldn’t be comfortable writing poetry myself. I wrote about the shame or stigma I felt around it, and [I wasn’t talking about] the challenge of great poets that you study in English class. Where I went to school, there was a spoken word program, and it was a requirement every year. The teacher who ran the program would come in to your class and run a week-long workshop. I was just too embarrassed to share this stuff with my classmates. I didn’t want to expose [myself] trying to be deep or any of that. I just blew it off a lot of the time. The one time I really tried, I couldn’t get through it without laughing at myself.

Now I feel like it’s really silly to be afraid of those things, and I should have embraced something I’m good at, which is speaking candidly about how I feel. It’s kind of funny—that’s something that maybe you naturally have as a kid or is somewhat innate to childhood, the way kids are brutally honest. Somewhere along the line, you’re like, “Oh wait, life is a competition,” and everything is a reality show; everything is an episode of “The Apprentice.” You learn about parts of the world where the currency is how much you can withhold. But eventually, you learn that if you actually communicate with people then you’ll have happier relationships. [With this essay], I wanted to figure out why we’re so scared of feelings.

I’ve loved Alexander Chee’s writing for some time, from the powerful essays that served as my introduction to his work to his debut novel, Edinburgh. Chee won a Whiting Award for Edinburgh, and is a recipient of the NEA fellowship in fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and on NPR. The Toast asked Alexander to talk with us about writing, teaching, changes in publishing, his recent “Future Queer” cover story for The New Republic, and his forthcoming second novel, The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Feb. 2016).

The Toast: New York is home for you, but you grew up in Korea, Hawaii, Guam, and Maine, and in some of your essays you’ve mentioned moving a lot as an adult, too. Can you talk a little bit about growing up in so many different places? How has that, and moving around so much, influenced your writing?  

Alexander Chee: I suspect I don’t have quite the same relationship to place.

I remember when we moved to Maine and I realized that we wouldn’t keep moving — in a way, staying in place was harder. And the kids I met, this was age 6 — they couldn’t imagine or even pronounce “Guam”. It felt like meeting evangelical Christians and knowing there are other gods.

So for a long time after that, I felt as if my real home was someplace I had yet to find. Part of that was about being biracial in that historical moment — my parents’ marriage was illegal just a few years before they married. People would say, for decades, “Someday everyone will look like you,” which made me feel as if the place I belonged was the future, not the present — and which also made it feel as if it would never arrive. It was like being born into exile, an immigrant at birth from a country that didn’t exist yet — a country I’d have to build or, maybe, find.

A therapist once accurately described me as someone with many identities I keep in reserve for those who can understand them — and that I needed to experience myself as whole, not as a series of aliases created in order to have connections to others. I suspect that may be why I write fiction. That’s something I do explore in my new novel — a feeling of being permanently outside, always pretending to belong to the landscape, of changing one’s identity regularly and starting over, again and again. I gave that to Lilliet, my narrator in The Queen of the Night, though I didn’t realize it until near the end of writing it.

After your recent Future Queer cover story for TNR, you hosted a #FutureQueer conversation @tnr. What has most surprised or stuck with you from that discussion and the overall response to your story?  

I was and am still very moved by the very personal responses I’ve received. Stories of the emotional cost. A friend whose godmother wanted her whole life to marry her partner and now at 93, her partner’s Alzheimer’s would make it an empty gesture, or a one-sided one.

There was a certain amount of people who believed I was saying whatever they needed me to say — that I was for or against marriage, for or against assimilation, despite my trying to describe my very real ambivalence and my fears about the future. But mostly I think that what I was trying to say was heard.

In the Twitter chat what was immediately apparent, though, was the way the problems in America are the problems in the LGBTQI community — in our case, an exhaustion with looking at two white men in suits carrying bouquets and not seeing any other faces or getting the stories of other lives. Behind the word “intersectionality” is so much potential strength — and it’s exhausting to see that unmet still as much as it is.