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Apogee Benefit Preview #2 This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. Today’s interview features queer Fujianese poet and drag performer Wo Chan, one of our four benefit readers. The Fujianese are badasses: an interview with Wo Chan by Melody Nixon Melody Nixon (MN): Your poetry investigates and challenges prescribed notions of identity through the personal and intimate. In the 2010s, decades after the slogan was first used by feminists, is the personal still political? What power lies in the intimate? Wo Chan (WC): Absolutely. Confession: I’ve never voted in my life. This is mostly due to timing—I was too young to vote when I was a U.S. citizen, and by the time I was old enough, I had lost my citizenship. Does this mean my life is not political? I think being a Chinese immigrant is inherently political if you look at the foundational role that Chinese Americans had in catalyzing U.S. immigration policy—namely, exclusion. To be a queer person of color fighting deportation is a burden of multiple politics that I was never ready to navigate. It’s also deeply personal, because at the core of...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams, Sophia E. Terazawa

Apogee Journal

22 Sep 2015

Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams Sophia E. Terazawa A stain on the right lens of my glasses looks like Princess Kaguya of the moon floating in the iris. I take them off. Someone must have put her there, I think. My father had shown me a photograph of her once. She used to be a parachute in the sky. Pale. A dandelion seed in her own night. “Is she watching over me now, papa?” “Yes,” he says. And I become happy. When my father finds me in front of the television at two in the morning, he slaps me so hard that the glasses fly off my face. Loud questions in male voices scare me: “What are you doing, huh? Why are you looking at me like that? What is your PROBLEM?!” The illness angers my father. He does not know why I watch television at two in the morning. I stare him down. No explanation. No answer. He slaps me so hard that it sends me into lunar orbit. “Papa, can you tell the story again? The one about the lonely princess?” “Yes,” he says. And I adore him whole. Whole....

Uncategorized

Reason to Give #6: Writing in the Margins

Apogee Journal

21 Sep 2015

Our 6th reason to give: we want to reclaim the margins, and we are committed to help others do so with words. Check out our Writing in the Margins Workshops. There are too few spaces that allow writers and artists to grapple with their complex social and political identities, and use that interrogation to expand the scope and relevance of literature. This was the aim of Writing in the Margins, our 8-week writing and critical discussion group in Brooklyn. We demand relevant literature! We are working to create it, are you? Read some of the incredible writing by the workshop participants on Perigee: I remember the immediate bond we felt as young widows whose husbands had been taken from us by the AIDS epidemic. Mari’s husband Reinaldo had returned from the war in Angola in 1985, around the same time that my husband Clarence had finally kicked a 13 year heroin habit that started when he served in Vietnam. Different wars, different countries…two women unknowingly at risk. Every time I visited with Mari I had the same unspoken thought––why her, why not me? I was painfully aware of the different route the virus had taken through each...