My first letter of acceptance, to UMass – Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman. Alexander Chee Read Quote
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers – Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf – and much of this writing was political as well as literary. Alexander Chee Read Quote
I would stay two years in San Francisco, then move to New York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who lived there. When I arrived in New York, I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of a bookstore I’d worked at in San Francisco, A Different Light. They had a New York store as well, and arranged an employee transfer. Alexander Chee Read Quote
When I’m identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. ‘Did you go to school for it?’ someone asks. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Where?’ they ask, because I don’t usually offer it. ‘I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,’ I say. Alexander Chee Read Quote
At first, teaching was more or less a straightforward way of making a living and having access to institutional resources while writing – aka libraries. And that was not inconsiderable. But it didn’t in any way touch the writing. Maybe it would push the writing aside sometimes, but mostly it was fine. Alexander Chee Read Quote
As a young writer, I questioned the idea that I had to write fiction in a world where I could write my own ethnicity only and nothing else. ‘Fach’ to me was a little like that. As a biracial person, that’s an inherently unstable identity. Alexander Chee Read Quote
The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne. Alexander Chee Read Quote
Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances. Alexander Chee Read Quote
When you’re bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, ‘What are you?’ It was like I wasn’t even human. Alexander Chee Read Quote
