Dear Friend/ Teacher/Comrade/Lover/Artist: Interview with Foglifter Contributor Nancy Au
Dear Friend/Teacher/Comrade/Lover/Artist is a collection of emails between myself, Carson Ash Beker, and Nancy Au, on the occasion of the release of Nancy Au’s Spider Love Song. It began when tried to review this book I loved, written by someone whose art, friendship, and teaching has formed me—and realized that it was all wrong; the very form of the review, as an encapsulation and judgment of a work, was antithetical to art, friendship, love, what Nancy embodies and teaches about being an artist in the world, queerness (as love, collective liberation, and the dismantling of borders), and the soul of this book, which is wonder. I decided instead to write to Nancy—as a friend, comrade, teacher, beloved, and artist—about some of the themes in this book: belonging, queerness, invisibility, and becoming.
Nancy Au’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Smoke Long Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Necessary Fiction, Fiction Southeast, Word Riot, Identity Theory, Prick of the Spindle, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University, and teaches creative writing at California State University. You can buy Spider Love Song and Other Stories, here.
Carson Ash Beker is an Oakland-based writer, playwright, storyteller, and actor with an MFA and MA from SFSU. They’ve taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, 826 Valencia, and around San Francisco. They are the former Fiction Editor of Fourteen Hills and was co-founder of Wayward Writers and The Escapery. Their work has appeared in Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, Foglifter, Exit Theater, Gigantic Sequins, Custom Made Theater, Bourbon Penn, RADAR Productions, Red Light Lit, Quiet Lighting, Spunk, and Cutthroat. They are proud to be a Lambda Emerging Writer in Fiction, a former Tin House Scholar, and a recipient with Nancy Au of OSU’s Spring Creek Project collaborative residency. They are the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions theater company. Their workshops have been known to include crayolas, acting, maps, field trips, Dracula, and a whole lot of writing. She is a 2016 Lamdba Literary Resident in Fiction, a recipient of a 2016 Tin House workshop scholarship, and a member of Clarion’s class of 2018.
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