First Pass
July 30 2025

[TUS] First Pass - July 29

VIEW RECORDING - 49 mins (No highlights)

@0:00 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Weijun Wang 汪蔚君. Hi, Bailey. Hello.

@0:41 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Sorry if I'm a little delayed or anything. My computer's having some issues, but hopefully it's okay.

@0:50 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Do you have the Google Doc for me? Yeah, sure.

@0:55 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Let me grab the link and I'll put it in the chat.

@0:57 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, thanks.

@2:03 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, it's in there, Esmé, and I just set it up the same way we did last time, so with a folder for a document for anonymous work and then separate ones for different people.

@2:16 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, amazing. Thank you. Thank you.

@3:18 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Hi, everyone. I'm about to put in the chat a link to the drive that Esmé is going to be drawing from, which many of you probably uploaded your work to already, just in case you want to follow along.

@3:34 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

And hello, everyone. I'm just taking a moment to choose the ones that will go through today. have what's happening,

Okay. We have so many people here. Hello, everyone. This is such nice and I'm really glad you're all here.

As far as is going to be reviewed, today, I decided to do it a little bit differently this time because I felt that last time in the order of one name didn't seem quite.

So I used the random number generator to select three people. I'm trying to say that the three people just keep it a secret.

right. All All All Is there lag in my audio?

@5:07 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Yeah, Esmé, I think there's a little bit of a lag or just some choppiness on your audio and video.

@5:17 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, I have bad internet here sometimes. I'm gonna leave and come back.

@5:25 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, sounds good. Thank you.

@6:02 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Okay, let's see if it is better now. I'm just going to talk a little bit to experiment with how it is.

Does it seem better? Yeah, that seems better, Esmé Okay, terrific. Okay, thank you for commenting about that. Like I said, the internet is a little weird here.

Um, so using the, uh, random number generator, I picked three names. They were Farzana, Jen Bryant, and Rachel B.

Um, so I'm going to go through those and hope, and just want to say at the beginning, like, remember, uh, I am not like the great god of like knowing things.

This is just my review of going through people's work. And, uh, my thoughts as I am going through. And, it.

The other thing is that I'm sorry if I am not able to get to yours and hopefully you will be able to learn as much as if I had.

Okay, I'm going to open this and open Marzana's. Okay. Maybe we should all open it to look through it.

Okay. So, beginning here, my miniature cellular existence began inside Ma's warm womb. Okay. I think that's like a nice short first sentence.

I really like the phrase miniature cellular existence. I know that reference to cells is very common when you talk about the growth of that about a fetus.

But, for For some reason here, putting the word miniature there makes it feel a little bit more original. Little cells were planted by grandmothers before her and passed on to my mother.

And when my mother met my father, I was one such cell that found life. And then here we think, makes me think about, you know, the maternal lineage and then how men enter that.

Ma's parents had passed away when she was barely a few years old, running barefoot on the sand in our ancestral village of Dabell in India.

Apakala told me that she was raised by an uncle of hers before getting married to my grandfather. The names of her parents, the years between her toddlerhood and her marriage are lost through the world of forgotten stories.

Most remembrances began after she married and had children. So here, in this first paragraph, we... we are talking about the narrator's experience like what happened to the narrator how did the narrator um quote unquote like find life um and then it kind of shifts to a very different topic it seems about her mother's parents and how they had passed away um and then again like going back into something even further back uh about the incident ancestral village so it goes from like talking about me to talking about like my mother's parents and then the ancestral village is even further back so we're kind of taking a very zoomed in vision and then kind of zooming out um in these lines so uh uh getting married to my grandfather um again like still zooming out

Now, we're still talking about the lineage. But it is interesting, this last line, last two lines are about how much forgetting happens when we think about our lineage or what is going on with our memories, let alone other people.

And I do wonder why her grandmothers, that's what I'm assuming, remembrances began after she got married. Like, what happened to everything before that, it makes me think, oh, that indicates trauma to me.

So now we return back to the marrieders' experience. But I am insistent about remembering. I make notes about all sorts of things, like the way my father's office smelled of old around.

I like that because it's a very specific note like I imagine I think like it's not quite clear and maybe it would be nice if it were a little clearer if we knew whether Farzana was young while she was making these notes and therefore like making these notes and these memories as they're happening or if Farzana is making the notes right now.

now about memories I think the difference is that these very specific memories take on a different meaning like if the father's office was being memorialized at the time that it happened we take the memory itself a little bit more like seriously it feels more like proof because like oh this is being recognized now this

This is being written down now. And we know that like memories change, we know that like memories change every time we think about the memory.

So depending on when it is, could be now, then the large blue rubber bands would be, you know, it could absolutely be the way it happens, but there's a little less like that kind of proof feeling.

Um, I try to remember into being the imprints of generations that live in me and breathe life into the gaps that web us together.

So here's kind of like the thesis statement, um, of the, uh, of this piece, as far as I can tell.

Um, we're introduced to kind of like the author and then the, the ancestral stuff, um, that the author is coming from.

Um, and then also. Um. It's of what the author wants to do, wants to remember, wants to figure out the lineage and what it means.

And these things that may have been lost for now, but, you know, may come back during the remembering. I like this detail about the time my mother froze a fish's eyeball for one of her grandchildren.

It's really interesting to me because my family does eat fish's eyeballs just, you know, because you don't waste food.

Um, but I do wonder, like, why would you, why would you freeze the eyeball? Um, you don't, uh, you don't have to tell us in this piece.

I think it's fine without that. But if you could just tell us in the chat, um, Farzana, what this indicated.

about it. Like why why freeze a fisheye ball I'm just curious okay um so now we're we move back into present tense which is a very interesting um choice um i'm standing my little kitchen on top of an istanbul hill nursing blocks of butter into ghee with a delicate tender process soft bubbles rising to the top of the liquid turning deep golden brown like the color of moss skin oh i i love these sentences i feel like they're very lyrical i feel like they help us see and even though you didn't mention smell like i could smell what's happening i really love how you refer the golden brown to moss skin that's a very you know it's a choice it's a choice to refer back to the maternal lineage um okay thank you

you, Farzana. Outside, it's bright and sunny with the sharpness of the end of the winter in the northern hemisphere.

The air is tinged with anxiety and a deadly virus. It's been the first of many lockdowns that marked these years of our fragile lives.

Okay, this is interesting. So now we have like more context. We know that people are anxious and this seems like COVID-19.

And so we're talking about these lockdowns. Lots of people chose to do interesting things. Making sourdough, growing a garden, stuff like that.

And so I do wonder if making ghee is part of that for the author. I'm unable to travel to visit my family who live thousands of miles away from me in Johannesburg.

I adapted into this new COVID landscape by inheriting a new home in my kitchen, the game of birthing. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. The very act of nursing a pot of food on the stove filled me with a thousand stories and questions.

I felt closer to my family by nourishing myself in these acts of remembrance, generativeness, and proofing." Okay, I do wonder here, this is really, I find this very interesting.

I do wonder, because the food is such a symbol of memory and such a symbol ancestral, ancestral things that we don't necessarily know yet.

Where are the recipes coming from? Are these, like, passed down from people? Is this something that you looked up?

Is it, you know, something that you've always known how to do since you were a child? That's what I'm wondering.

During these lockdowns, I spent days babying farm butter on a gentle plan. Yeah, this is really lovely. I like this last sentence a lot.

Um, I'd be interested to see, like, where this goes. Um, I, I think that the structure might be a challenge, but overall, I just think this is a really lovely piece.

There's a lot of warmth in it. There's a lot of, like, um, makes me think of, like, my own maternal lineage, makes me think of, like, my own experiences with cooking.

So thank you so much. Um, I really you very Okay, so now I'm going to go to Jen Bryant's Here.

Okay. Okay. This is called Ambition. In the days and weeks following my son's birth, his presence exerted a gravitational pull that belied his small stature.

Wow, we're we're going for another piece that begins with, um, like, life, like the beginning of life. No longer the center of my own life, I was now the tide to his moon, ebbing and flowing in response to his needs.

The concept of time now lost, uh, the concept of time lost all meaning as I surrendered to this primal rhythm.

Um, I'm a little bit wonderful. I about this metaphor just because um you're comparing your relationship to your son with the moon to the tide um but then you say ebbing and flowing in response to his needs which i feel like is a little bit confusing because you're the tides ebbing and flowing or what is the ebbing and flowing and i i i immediately thought of like menstrual stuff um but i think because ebbing and flowing is very literal like that's what the tide does do um it's a little confusing when you say in response to his needs because the metaphor gets chopped up to i i hope you understand what i mean um the concept of time lost all meaning as i surrender to this primal rhythm um so

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And this first paragraph gives us this really intense feeling of, like, this person depends on me.

And it's become so important that my whole body, my whole self, is devoted to this person. At night, I startled awake when his cries pierced the hushed air of our darkened bedroom, quieting only when I lifted him from the bedside bassinet.

And pulled him into my arms. That's a very vivid image. I can really see and feel that. My husband stirred slightly as I fumbled one-handed with the clasps of my nursing bra then resumed snoring.

Long after soothing my son back to sleep, the feeding and diaper change were simply the steady sound of my heartbeat pressed against his sweet-smelling cheek.

and had studied his face illuminated by slivers of moonlight. I shot through the cracks in the chest. So there are two things that are so vivid for me in reading this one is like as you're fumbling one-handed that is such a great phrase because it really conveys the urgency of the moment like maybe it doesn't matter that much if you're like a little bit slower with figuring out your bra for a feeding but it feels it feels that way and it feels that way.

I think for the reader or at least for me and of course um these the slivers of moonlight shooting through cracks in the cheap vinyl blinds I feel like everybody has seen those kinds of crack uh slivers of moonlight we've ever been anywhere with like cheap vinyl blinds um as the inky sky began to lighten I watched his chest rise and fall overwhelmed by the sheer joy and terror of being past.

hours. For this tiny new life This is a little confusing to me as well because I am wondering, were you always awake when the sky starts to lighten?

Because here you're like, because you say I startled awake, so that means it's a particular moment in time and then you describe what happened.

um and that but the way that you describe it becomes like a a repetitive thing i'd study his face so it's like oh you're doing this over and over again but then if you're it over and over again um it's a little bit confusing when you say as the inky sky began to lighten because if you're doing it again and again are you always waking up when the sky is lightning

Are you always tending to your son when the sky begins to lighten? This is very just like the technical thing, but it can be confusing and I love the way you phrase the joy.

think things like happiness can be really hard to describe and so taking that on, taking on that challenge is really, really great here.

Even now, I can't recall a single world event that occurred between my son's arrival and my own 19th birthday a month later.

I don't know what songs reached the top of the billboard charts or what movies broke box office records either.

Once inquisitive and eager to learn, with my notes perpetually stuck in a book, my mind suddenly felt as fragmented as my disrupted sleep patterns.

The universe shrank to fit within the four walls of the nursery. Everything else, politics, pop music, pop culture, personal ambitions, ambitions.

All that mattered now was this perfect, tiny human and the invisible thread of love and hormones stretching between us, tethering me to the rocking chair." Oh, I don't have much to say about this last paragraph in terms of changes.

I love this idea because when I started to read the first line, I thought you were going to say, like, I can remember, like, things about my son during the time that, like, major world events were happening and, like, when 9-11 happened, he used to learn to walk or, like, blah, blah, But you're doing this opposite thing.

It's, like, the, I can't remember who wrote this, but it's, like, a little poem that's, like, it rained, like, it's, like, we rained, it rained all week.

What? We stayed inside, it rained all week, I didn't notice, or like, I'm sorry, that's definitely not the poem, but I hope you know what I'm talking about.

It's that, you're like, you're so focused on this beautiful thing that everything else is gone, you're just very narrowed, and so I think, yeah, I really don't have anything to criticize with that last paragraph, and I'm very interested to know where it comes next, because ambition is the title, but there isn't that much writing about ambition here.

I can see it kind of when you talk about you used to be ambitious, but now it seems like you're not, or ambition is put on hold.

I anticipate that you'll speak much more about it later. But yeah, thank you so much. I feel really lucky to have read that.

Thank you. So the next person is Rachel B. Okay. All right. Like the locusts said to have swarmed ancient Egypt, baby things invaded the interior of Francis's home.

Plushies, play pens, puzzles, pacifiers, plastic plates, picture books crowded the narrow walking paths between rooms. Francis swooped in and tried to exterminate the mess as quickly as he could, while I insisted he didn't need to, feeling like an invader to his private space.

So, um, yeah, this is a very vivid image and drops us right into a place where like I'm not sure what's happening it's like okay uh Francis this is the place where Francis lives I don't know who Francis is but whoever Francis is suddenly the inside of his home has become covered in like kid things um and somehow they're in the hallways and I'm not quite sure why they're in the hallways um also Francis perhaps as a tidy person um he's trying to like make the place cleaner and also there's some issue with the narrator feeling like they can't help so there's some very curious things there are already these little mysteries being planted like why are all these things in the hallways um um

Why is Francis why is the narrator so conscious what Francis doesn't want to happen after Francis that set his daughter down to nap he led me to his office for papers and marked up books replace the family rooms letter Francis hesitated for a half second before reaching up his fingers brushed over the cardboard lid lingering as if you're debating something then with a quiet breath.

He lifted the box from his plate like a relic from an altar. Okay so again there's this interesting mystery so Francis has like a cardboard box and is opening it as a surprise as a secret it thumps on to the floor between us as cardboard edges frayed soft from years of handling inside hundreds of sheets of paper

Yellowed creased, smudged with the oil of fingertips long gone. I write poems when I'm psychotic, Francis said, voice low, hundreds of them.

Okay, so now like part of the story is the mystery is removed here, like we understand much more what's happening.

I have guessed something like this, or I guess some kind of mental illness, but it's still like a revelation when we're being told.

I sifted through dozens of his pieces while sitting on the floor and scribbling notes for class about Francis' work.

Francis seated himself on his office chair and clasped and unclasped his hands, tapped his right foot and picked out his vehicles in the asylum.

This is also interesting. I feel like this piece is so full of mysteries that that then get solved or not solved.

So now I'm like, okay, uh, the narrative narrator is going through the poems he's written and making notes for class and I'm like okay is this is this her class or is this Francis's class and making notes kind of indicates like a critique of some kind so I also like this description of what Francis is doing it's like what you do when you're waiting for something when you're waiting for something to happen and you are also kind of nervous.

These are great I told him. think I would have told him that his writing was great regardless of whether it was or not.

I wanted him to like me and I needed him to continue divulging his story for class but I also meant it sensing a twinge of jealousy slithered in my core.

I wished I could write like him. Wow what an interesting last paragraph. Um I wanted, wanted to. I to like me and then I wonder like why and then I needed him to continue divulging his story for class so it does seem like the narrator has found this person Francis who may or may not be a relative or just someone you came upon or a neighbor or whatnot but there's something about like taking a class and perhaps like doing a project related to Francis and related to the poems um that Francis um um writing I would really recommend for this piece um if if you um now my brain is not working um if look at the book um a miraculous the miraculous is spelled m-i-r-r-a-q-c-u-l-u-s I think it's called like a miraculous kind of paradise and it's written by um I think Sam因為我吱像是ayan可所以她 соп了答案可以製造ify了授火源應草寶瑠uire許再跑方向和用

Sam something sorry I'm not being very helpful but it's very interesting because Sam I'm sorry Sam if I'm getting your name wrong right now because we did an event together for this book Sam's uncle what had schizophrenia and so the entire book that she wrote is filled with the papers of what he has written and a lot of them don't really make sense but she tries to interpret them in order to like understand what Sam is like or sorry to understand what her uncle is like and she does this after her uncle has died to understand what he was like try to understand him better through his writing and also to understand schizophrenia better and I kind of see that a little bit in this book so it may be an interesting look for you thank you so much.

um i think we have enough time for one more person bonus person so i'm gonna go back thank you for your note rachel that's really cool what an interesting assignment okay let's see generate a number okay 12 christina tran that's you okay while i'm sitting in the death cafe circle a new question arises for me how do i reconcile this idea of ancestors with this idea of reincarnation which i believe on some level but this idea of having an altar to your dead when you commune with in the afterlife burning for them and paper gold and paper paper

Okay, so first there's a mystery which is what is the Deaf Cafe circle. Then we come up with a question which provides a new mystery.

How do you reconcile the idea of ancestors with the idea of reincarnation? So I think the question here is if we are reincarnated, why do we have to send paper iPhones to our ancestors?

This is just like a thing that I think this isn't limited to like Taiwanese or Chinese people at all.

But I'm Taiwanese, so I know about what Taiwanese people do, which is you can go out and buy these like very detailed paper things to burn for your loved ones or whoever is for the you're feel I'll-shovos-shaped

So they can enjoy them in the afterlife and they can get really specific like you'd be like uh I really want to make like a Nintendo 64 for my brother who passed away or you can be like I want you to make like 10 umbrellas because they were always getting wet it they get very very detailed and you can even like have a house made this is also very like it's very detailed and you can make all the things very detailed like a doll house and then burn it so that's the idea of um sending that to your ancestors but the question then is as Christina is asking if you're gonna burn all that stuff for them doesn't it not make sense because you also believe in reincarnation and therefore they become somewhere or something else and all of that burnt stuff isn't going to do with them any good if they're like a beetle to what we're seeing.

So that's that's the question that seems to be asked and I do like the details about what you burn because not everyone knows about that phenomenon or like what it means when you commune in the afterlife and it also tells the reader that the writer cares enough about spirituality to have an altar of their own does someone stop becoming a spirit I can commune with once they're born again into the earthly realm or is it a stepped process first you're dead and accessible via altars then you enter the ancestral realm then you pass on from there into reincarnation my parents don't feel like ancestors to me they feel like dead parents so here we were kind of thinking through the the Thank

And we get some more information about the writer's parents. Someone shares a story of meeting the kindred spirit of a deceased loved one in the living body of someone much too old to make sense within reincarnation timelines.

But that person's spirit was that person's spirit and could be felt as such. That's really interesting. So, okay, I feel like the person who's sharing this story, I imagine, is in the death cafe circle.

So now I'm thinking like there's a group of people who are interested in death, maybe specifically some kind of Asian spirituality.

And they're kind of like going around the circle, discussing what death means to them, and like asking these questions so that they can help each other kind of like understand death.

I have no idea if that's actually what it is, but as a reader, that's what it And I'm also so fascinated about this story about meeting the kindred spirit of a deceased loved one.

In a later draft, I would love to see that expanded. Um, I think it's so intriguing that it deserves more space.

Um, I already knew time was nonlinear. In circle that day, I realized that love is too. That's really beautiful.

Um, and it brings, brings us back to thinking about, um, narrator's parents. Um, I do wonder if maybe mentioning the parents in that line would be helpful.

Um, but, you know, it's up to you obviously. After the Death Cafe, I'm leaning against a wall in a basement apartment under some track lighting, listening to a voice note from a friend.

How had he decided to move back to his hometown? Closer to his parents. Closer part of his ancestors. and he's a little timid about sharing this because my parents are gone okay so it seems like this person who is moving back home to be closer to his parents which is a very very common phenomenon um and i know a lot of people who do that um especially if the parents are ill and then you're kind of like taking care of your parents um so in the this moment we can really feel for the writer like it's kind of it feels kind of grim in the description and then this kind of like sharing from the this voice note um the person is trying to be kind by not uh by not sharing it in a way that hurts but it seems like it will hurt anyway so the narrator says i stare into and

The emptiness of the apartment. I have been asking myself all these questions about why I move around so much.

It is only now that I am making the connection. When my parents died and we sold my childhood home, I became uprooted in a way, upheaval torn adrift.

It has made rooting again harder. Interesting. Okay. I do wonder what the next paragraph is after this one, because this is a very meaty paragraph.

the last one, and I feel like it can be expanded quite a bit. Um, in the, like, few minutes we have left, I was wondering if we could, um, Aileen, are we able to have people talk in this kind of meeting, or is it no?

We can't? Yeah, this is just a regular meeting, so people can call off. Okay. I was wondering if we could go through the people who were people that are, we

um discuss today and hear a little bit from them about about their um what they were thinking when they wrote that their pieces and anything that comes to mind to them so first that would be farzana um could you come off and tell us a little bit about this piece yeah sure hi um yeah so um i am trying to write this essay for an anthology around like you said matrilineal kind of lineage i think i'm glad that that was clear because then you know that that thread is kind of exposed in that sense and um i think what i'm tracing also is how we begin you know on the cellular level couple generations before we are here and if um if if i don't like and the possibilities of passing that on um um

@42:00 - farzana (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

They end with me when there are no children. So I'm finding I want to trace it through food and through ghee and through that kind of story of how how the how how matrilineal how the lineage can continue through me.

I think that's just what I'm trying to trying to do. Yeah, I think that comes across quite well.

@42:23 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Thank you so much for sharing that with us and good luck with the rest of the piece. Yeah, thank you.

Um, can we hear from the next person that we had was was it Jen Bryant? Yeah, hi.

@42:41 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Hi.

@42:42 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Hi.

@42:42 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

So first of all, thank you so much for your feedback. That was really helpful, especially when it came to the metaphor.

It definitely gave me something to think about. How can I make that more clear? Um, with this piece, it's the lead into a chapter of my project, which is kind of a woven memoir.

That lends my experiences with teen pregnancy and parenting with kind of the larger social context. So something that's always kind of struck me is that after I had my son, it was kind of like everyone expected that I had just like left my brain in the delivery room.

You know, it's like, oh, you should go like work in a mini mart or you should like, you know what I mean?

And not that there's anything wrong with that. Like I spent 10 years in retail when he was small, but I had all these ambitions, too.

Um, and when I started this chapter, I was really thinking about something that the sociologist, Kristen Luker, found in her research, which was that there's all these statistics about teen parents not going on to finish high school or finish college and kind of perpetuating this cycle.

But what she actually found to her surprise was that the birth of a child could serve as a catalyst for parents and actually push them to do better.

And when I read that, like several years after my son was born, when I I was already enrolled in college I was like yes exactly that's how I felt but at the same time I was kind of bumping up against not only like logistical concerns of like where do I where do I put said child while I'm taking classes and also working but also kind of this this wall of like lowered expectations if that makes sense.

@44:20 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

talk a little bit about what the catalyst meant for you like what what how did the catalyst exist for you as my motivation?

@44:28 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Yeah, definitely. I think and I kind of go more into the ambition later in this essay. So this is kind of like that's what I thought like it went dormant and then as he started to grow it was really when he went to preschool like I kind of started to feel this.

This feeling you know after he was old enough that we kind of emerged from those early baby days and I started to feel like a person again.

that there was something more I could be doing besides like working retail and you know mashing avocados to feed.

the kind I wanted to do something with the other parts of my brain. And I think it was really like when he went back to school that I thought about what it meant for me and how much I wanted him to have these opportunities.

I'm a first-generation college graduate and, you know, oh, thank you. But it's like, you know, I didn't feel like I could sit there and say, like, education, you know, is something that I value if I wasn't modeling that.

@45:28 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Like, had him in I this very, like, in this Montessori school that took, like, most of my money.

@45:33 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

And I was really just, like, trying so hard to, like, give him the best opportunities with the resources that I had.

So I guess kind of the catalyst was, like, I wanted all these things for him. But then, and I wanted to be better for him.

But then I also kind of wanted something that was just mine, too, if that makes sense.

@45:50 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Like, so I guess kind of like a multifaceted thing.

@45:54 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Um, and also kind of, I think, like, a giant middle finger to everyone who said that I couldn't do it because,

Because I was like a punk rock teenager and I think I still sort of maintained that spirit like well into my 40s.

@46:06 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

yeah, I think like the idea that like teenage pregnancy names that the girl is dumb is a very common cultural misconception.

@46:18 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Um, and I can't wait to read your book.

@46:21 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Thank you. Oh, thank you.

@46:23 - Jen Bryant (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Um, okay.

@46:25 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

Can we hear from Rachel B? Hello?

@46:34 - Bailey Flynn (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

I believe Rachel was saying that, uh, she's in the library and so she put her response in the chat.

So I don't know if you want to read it out loud.

@46:43 - Esmé Weijun Wang (Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君)

do you say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay. Let's see. Okay. Oh, there's so much in the chat. Okay. Um, like you're going going going to type errors.

errors. And it says, totally fine, and then, oh okay here, thank you again for the workshop, the memoir is about coming to terms with psychosis, and my immediate reaction was to get a mentor.

So under the guise of a real grad school writing assignment to profile someone, I set out to find that person.

At our first meeting, Francis invited me back to his first place as a surprise to possibly both of us, and that's the scene you see here.

We rightly picked up on him being a meticulously clean person, which is at odds with having a baby. A significant part of the memoir is the evolution of our completely platonic relationship.

I selected this excerpt because I wanted to test out the tension that we felt at that first meeting. I think those nerves came through based on your feedback.

Thank you again. Oh, I can't, that's such a brilliant, I can't wait to read this book. I'm so excited about this book.

Thank you so much. you And we have one last person. Thank It was Christina Tran but Christina is actually not here in the session okay okay um well it is 145 actually so um thank you all so much um i'm so grateful for your presence and um commitment to your work i'm so excited to kind of head into this last month with you although it does seem like we may be shifting into a different kind of format so keep your ears out for that um again thank you all so much and i'll talk to you soon bye