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Apogee Journal is excited to welcome Esmé-Michelle Watkins as our newest Fiction Editor on our editorial team. See what she has to say about being a writer and lawyer, literary justice, and the book that was so spectacular, she threw it against the wall. Apogee Journal [AJ]: Welcome to Apogee Journal! As a fiction writer and attorney, you are part of a long legacy of lawyer-poets from Wallace Stevens to Monica Youn. How do you see these two aspects of your working life coming together? Does one influence the other? If so, how? Esmé-Michelle Watkins [EW]: I became an attorney because I am immensely concerned with effecting justice in the world. I suppose I am a writer for the same reason. The most elemental function of language is to control an experience or history by describing it. If our cultural histories are not embraced by language in this way, they are subject to erasure. Growing up, I didn’t come across too many fictional characters who looked or sounded like me or folks in my family. It was clear from an early age that we were part of a periphery that wasn’t always celebrated in the canon. I think we’ve...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Year of the Jack Rabbit, Hannah Lee Jones

Apogee Journal

01 Feb 2016

Year of the Jack Rabbit Hannah Lee Jones Happy new year of marveling how different and alike we are, in a Korean restaurant so busy that I’m squeezed against an Indian mother who’s with a boy who looks more like me than her. I’m puzzling this out when she explains that her son is by the counter and the one beside me is his friend, together for a Lunar New Year that’s two weeks of bao and sticky rice and strangers around tables like ours, a scrim of bamboo leaves on one end and steaming bowls of manduguk on the other. Our waitress reminds me of my aunt who just died, the leather-jacketed guy in the corner is a doppelgänger of my father at 20 and I’m pretending this kid with soup glazing his chin is my little brother. It’s hot, he complains. I tell him I hear him: hot like the wild-eyed horses our ancestors rode thundering over deserts you and I will never see. Hot like my father at 22 looking like a Mongolian John Wayne, but that was in pictures. Now I’m outside the corner store watching lion dancers wish the owners a year of good fortune,...

Fiction

FICTION: Skinny Tea, Chekwube O. Danladi

Apogee Journal

25 Jan 2016

Skinny Tea Chekwube O. Danladi The summer before we started 9th grade, a month after we were both finally fifteen, Georgie and I decided that we would stop eating. We made resolutions. Georgie wanted to stop eating so that people would no longer make fun of the thick rolls that coated her belly, chin, arms, and thighs. I wanted to lose weight so that I could fit into a too-small yellow thrifted bathing suit that mama bought me, because she couldn’t return it. The day we decided, we were on the swings at Towanda Park, behind the Metro station. Georgie and I were competing with each other to see who could swing higher. Her thick legs were tucked behind her, woodchips gathering in the ridged toes of her beaten Adidas every time she came down into her inverted arch. Competition was always the game with Georgie: who could swing the highest, who could use the biggest words, who could read the most books in one week. Our competition was always about self-improvement and self-preservation. We were each other’s only best friends. We hid together in the school library during lunch breaks because we were too shy to eat...