Only one more week to enter the contest I’m judging. Per Second Press is offering a $300 prize for the best review of Vi Khi Nao’s novella Swans in Half-Mourning. Details about the contest are here. 

He lived the hard life of breakfast sandwiches.

It was the perfect amount of food: just a bit too much.

Vi Khi Nao’s stories have been published by Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and Noon. She recently finished her MFA in literary arts at Brown University. I recently sat down with her to have a conversation about her new book Swans in Half-Mourning, which is out on Per Second Press. The press is also sponsoring a contest with a $300 prize for best review of Swans in Half-Mourning. Information on how to enter that contest is here. 

Monkfish Jowls: How did you write Swans in Half-Mourning?

Vi Khi Nao: I wrote most of Swans in Half-Mourning when I was in Providence, using two hands and a new set of Asian almond-shaped eyes. I wrote the first few bad drafts on a manual typewriter (over a hundred years old) and maybe one crawfishmosquitosmelly draft while I was in Baton Rouge staring at its unruly airport. Each time I typed, it coughed up a few semantic spider webs and India Point dusk. Sometime I wrote in the morning. It was a piece workshopped for Brian Evenson’s class. He said we could submit anything.

Originally, the narrative was to thrive on a non-homosexual plane, but during the long summer of 2012, while I was eating fancy Nordic and North American cookbooks, I felt extra-homosexual and decided that literary birds and women need to dip their tongues in languishing Sapphic bathiterature and alabaster milk made for only writers.

The earlier section, probably the sexiest, in particular, I wrote while I was on a train from Paris to Arles, France. I wrote it for Thalia Field. She has written Bird Lovers, Backyard, her recent published book then, and that summer I had fallen in love with her love for birds and her sense of humor related to the eradication of ants on the internet and, of the subject, Buddhism. Sometimes after I wrote Swans in Half-Mourning, the whole world seems to be raining eyes. Mourning eyes that would come after me and then eyes that would come after reader’s reproductive organ’s hearts. Sometimes I imagine them opening up like whetted oyster knives cracking up wide-awake oyster shells.

MFJ: The real-world fashion designer Alexander McQueen appears in this book. What makes him a fairytale character?

VKN: There are many ornithological references to McQueen’s dresses. Also, there is a Queen inside of his last name. Often a Queen or two exist in fairytales. This gives away everything: Alexander McQueen committed suicide, which is a fancy way of saying: come to the underworld for a chthonic fashion runway. My flesh. My ash. A dress. Black light bulbs the size of Lucifer.

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"At the bar I am served a beer and a parrot. You may have a parrot for your shoulder as you drink. The parrots, when served, lie on their sides on the bar, perhaps talking to you, until you pick them up. They are stored on a shelf under the bar like silverware…" —Padgett Powell, "South Carolina”

To celebrate the release of Vi Khi Nao’s novella Swans in Half-Mourning, Per Second Press is offering a $300 prize to those who purchase and write a review of the ebook which is available for $3.00. This is a great book, worth way more than $3.00, (In fact print copies sell for $300,000.) There is nothing to lose, and much to gain.

Here are the details via Per Second Press: 

I’ve been writing for a long time. Probably past the point where I should have given up and become an accountant.

I’ve found that if you keep going, you get to where you can take the fragments of things you’ve seen and things you’ve experienced and put these diverse strands together into something deeply felt.

And that is when the real fun starts.

Okay. The WALK light is on. I should probably cross this intersection—

like horses bending over a table to cut a grapefruit into quarters. 

—vikhinao