2024 Emerging Voices Fellows | The PEN Ten Interview 

The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, PEN America’s 2024 Emerging Voices Fellows, hailing from seven states across the country, provide insight into their creative processes, how they’ve developed as artists and writers, and what inspires their literary practice. PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship provides a five-month immersive mentorship program for early-career writers from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the publishing world. The fellowship nurtures creative community, provides professional development training, and demystifies the path to publication—with the ultimate goal of diversifying the publishing and media industries. Learn more about this year’s fellows.

1. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you? Why?

Na Mee: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein! In my absolute memory I spent my childhood inside it – at the edge of the world, riding in a flying shoe, deep in a hug o’ war, and more. Silverstein puts the play in wordplay. I’m grateful for his early lessons in how to have fun as a writer and reader.

As an adult: The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka. Transracial adoption by definition displaces adoptees from people who look like them, and often from other adoptees, too. This book shortened the distance: her adoptee experience brought me closer to hearing and knowing myself, and brought me closer to our culture and community as adoptees. 

2. How does your writing navigate truth? What is the relationship between truth and fiction?

Noelani Piters: No matter what genre I’m writing in—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction—I begin with the emotional truth of a situation. That is to say, what was felt, what was experienced, how what has happened has shaped me. Truth in itself is multifaceted, messy, and capacious, and I find fiction to be a powerful avenue for exploring its complexities and possibilities.

Truth and fiction are portals into each other; there’s a symbiosis that exists between them. Truth textures fiction with meaning, with resonance. And fiction reveals truth through narrative, its architecture allowing us to move through what we know, or hope to know.

3. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

Jemila Pratt: I leveraged language as an eight-year-old navigating feelings about a cross-country move due to my parents’ divorce. My self-imposed “book” project eventually morphed into writing as a creative outlet where characters could manifest as different parts of my identity. Composing short stories (and eventually poetry) from elementary through high school felt hopeful and empowering. Each page offered an escape that allowed me to get lost in carefully chosen words. Writing helps me feel at peace and has become an extension of myself; a meaningful tool to help heal self-esteem challenges, navigate an intense tempest of conflicting emotions, and a rewarding cathartic experience that is worthy of sharing, thus developing community with others.

4. What is your relationship to place and story? Are there specific places you keep going back to in your writing?

Gabb Schivone: I think it’s fair to say that the Sonoran Desert, the land of my birth in Tucson, Arizona, is a recurring place in my life as a writer for how deeply rooted into my existence it continues to be. Everything traces back there for me, immemorially: time, space, body, culture, migration, sun, the creosote-soaked smell of monsoon rains – all my senses live and die there and are reborn. The first time I was away for the longest period in my life – seven months – my body began to ache and I slipped into a sickness that was only cured when I returned home. So no matter where I go or live in the world, I’ll always be returning home on a Sonoran Homecoming.

Therefore, its place in my relationship to story is surely present, too. Childhood remains my entry point to story where its earliest memories and feelings are kept. As my childhood was swaddled in the Sonoran Desert, so too is my story, my life as a story-teller – and my connection to the story itself.

5. If you could claim any writers from the past as part of your own literary genealogy, who would your ancestors be?

Grace Z.L: My mother read the Chinese translation of “Jane Eyre” as a child and loved it, and then made me read it when I was in high school (and I read it, again and again), and now it’s one of those eternal books on my shelf that can elicit a reaction from people who feel a kind of connection to Charlotte Bronte’s heroine. I don’t know if I could “claim” this book. But I think it’s kind of incredible how nearly 200 years later, this set of characters continues inspire writers (see: “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys; or Kazuo Ishiguro) or even my mother, myself, or others who were once teenaged girls who could immediately identify with Jane Eyre’s solitude and perseverance. 

6. What do you read (or not read) when you’re writing?

Cyrana Martin: I’d like to say that I read everything. This is a vestigial vanity. I grew up nerdy and tragic looking. I had no romantic prospects. So I turned to books, hard, pretentious, “great” books hoping it might make me more interesting. I wanted to be like one of those brunettes who can sit and read everything all day every day. But I hate being inside, I hate being in the sun or wind or rain, my back aches, and I am so bitchy and lack anything resembling discipline. Sometimes I write things. And sometimes I finish books. Sometimes. Though increasingly I find that the books I finish are the ones which have meant the least to me. Often, when I manage to find a book I truly love, it floors me, I let out an audible gasp, and I find it difficult to move beyond that moment, beyond those words. How can one move on from a sentence so beautiful, so damning that it exhausts your whole breath? I often spend hours, days, weeks, returning to a single page, caressing a single sentence. I return to them the way you might return nightly to the room of someone so beautiful your heart falls out of your chest and you have no thought beyond wonder. Just pure wonder, reverence, awe. I think I will spend a lifetime rereading that first letter of Rilke’s. I have spent whole summers whispering Tintern Abbey. I have spent so long with these works that, even when I must lose them, when I must leave them behind, they will have somehow made their lasting marks on me, imprinting themselves effortlessly into my cadence, reshaping the very nature of my breath, filling it with something I can’t quite call air.

7. What’s something about your writing habits that has changed over time?

S. Bec: Though I had always wanted to be a writer, and as a child, wrote stories, I quickly gave up on that idea as an adult, and didn’t write for some time. About a decade ago, I began keeping a diary. Becoming a recorder of the life around me has given me a feel for how real life unfolds, and has given me a foundation for my stories. And committing to working on stories, daily, even if for just a few minutes, has turned writing into more of a habit, like tidying up a kitchen counter, instead of some sort of huge, terrifying project.

8. How does your identity shape your writing? Is there such a thing as “the writer’s identity?”

Kou Thao: As a nonfiction writer and memoirist, my identity is my writing. My “writer’s identity” is the lens through which I craft my art, attempting to convey my multidimensional identity within the two dimensions of ink on a page. As a queer, Hmong shaman and child of refugees who grew up in rural America, I never fit into the boxes people tried to place me in. I’ve spent my life explaining who I am and who my people are. When you must constantly explain your existence to others, you begin to believe that the mystery of you is not a story worthy to be told. “Too complicated”. Thus for me to write, to tell my story beyond two or three dimensions, is an act of rebellion and liberation. Proof that the bombs of war were not enough to kill me or my family’s dreams. A proclamation to the world that I exist and my story is worthy to be told, read, witnessed. 

9. What is a moment of frustration that you’ve encountered in the writing process, and how did you overcome it?

Sidney Logan Echevarria: Although I conceptually understood the definition of “writer’s block,” I’d never experienced it.  This summer, I was finally in an environment away from all distractions and was solely focused on my writing. But I could not write. Though I had a whole story brewing inside of me, it refused to come forth. At the risk of sounding indelicate, I was creatively constipated. It literally hurt. I sit with my characters and their stories. They are like spirits that follow me around, waiting for me to make them whole by putting them on the page, so there was a restlessness that came with this constipation. Just as it arrived, quietly with no announcement, it disappeared, and I could sit and put on the page what had been stirring in my head for a month and a half. I believe what made this possible was my personal acceptance of several big changes that I’d experienced: my oldest son had just transitioned from home to his freshman year in college; I was wrestling with imposter syndrome and doubt around my work; and I had several large deliverables at my day job that required focused attention and energy. When I was required to turn my attention back to myself, when I discovered that whether or not I was an imposter, I was the one my characters had chosen to give them body and voice, and when I learned that sometimes I just have to be still in the midst of the chaos to find the path, the words came. I’m not sure if this will be the path through every instance of frustration, but I am certain that each time, patience and remembering that I am the one to tell this story will be central to the way forward.

10. What does your creative process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?

Magdalena Arias Vásquez: Something I’ve learned in the past couple of years is that inspiration and momentum are not reliable. It’s routine that matters. I write for 1 hour and 30 minutes in the early morning every day, splitting that time between reading and then writing or editing. I can’t separate reading and media consumption from my writing process. Whatever I consume informs my writing in profound ways, and not just thematically, but also on a sentence level. I think that to be a good writer of any kind, you need to consume media almost frenetically. And all kinds of media, for that matter. I think it’s important to consume poetry and prose, but also theory, pop culture articles, fake news, music, movies, images, and spend time engaging with the people around us. especially elders, who have so much knowledge, and children, who know how to ask the right questions. I’ve gotten inspiration for poetry from all sources, all the way from Roland Barthes, to Billie Eilish, to my grandmother. It’s also important for me to read the work of translators and poetry in different languages. As someone whose work exists across linguistic borders, part of my process is playing with language and twisting it on its head. I’m always translating my poems from Spanish to English or vice versa, asking myself questions about meaning.

11. What do fellowships, workshops, and programs such as the Emerging Voices Fellowship mean to emerging writers? How, if at all, do they help with viewing oneself as a writer?

Tzynya Pinchback:  Anyone who knows me, knows workshopping is my jam. In my genre, cross genre, various artistic mediums, any practice, instruction or critique of a topic that can inform my writing is fair game. Writing workshops allowed me access to flexible instruction and mentoring when the competing priorities of single parenthood and full-time employment made the pursuit of a formal degree untenable. Workshopping has helped me learn to accept critique, trust my voice, and to give thoughtful critique of other’s work. Fellowships are an incubator, providing time and immersion into craft alongside a group of writers that, if you’re lucky, will become a vital part of your writing community. My first fellowship woke me up to the real work required to become the writer I had imagined (and still imagine) I could become. I wish I could say my time as an EV fellow has obliterated my nagging imposter syndrome (I still have that pang of terror that each decent line is a happy accident or luck or the planets knocked out of orbit). But maybe, and more importantly, gaining a spot in the program is a kind of proof others believe in my potential enough to provide financial support, guidance, and active encouragement. I’ve referred to this time as my year of failing up. Beginning with the decision to apply to EV, and then to be ten toes down in the challenge and thrill of this experience. I got sick 24 hours before the application deadline – sudden onset of pain is something I’m used to as a person living with chronic illness. Maybe it was a sign my body wasn’t up to the challenge: day job, writing fellowship, in-progress manuscript. But then I considered the word chronic means persisting, means I carry errant cells too stubborn to do what is expected and required of them. I rolled onto my side, propped my laptop on a few bed pillows, and slumped over the screen to slowly and methodically show up for myself – pushing SEND on my application. Each day in this fellowship affirms that decision.

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