By Duncan Whitmire • Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it…
It is the one-year anniversary of the day your husband’s body was cremated and you are at the Jefferson Middle School Fall Orchestra Concert. Here’s a fact: The funeral home people don’t normally tell the bereaved when a cremation…
I was halfway through the show when I first saw the picture, hanging all alone on a wall. I knew I should hurry up, had other things to do. But something about the size and the color drew me…
Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
When I signed the contract to publish my novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, with Noemi Press, I asked to include a clause that the press would make a “good faith effort” to publish it as an audiobook too. They’d never…
I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits. I stare down the mirror.…
In her debut short story collection, Take Me With You Next Time, Janis Hubschman illuminates the inner lives of girls and women by guiding the reader through the intricate crevices of her characters’ psyches—the thoughts and feelings that we…
I should have noticed when my wedding ring fell out of my pocket. I should have heard it strike and plink on the concrete floor in Big Willie’s dressing room behind the bar when I slung my jacket over…
Pretend I am your mother. Pretend you love me the way you did when you were small, and the world was big, and you could still feel, in some deep primordial way, that not so long ago, my body…
The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
I wrote the first draft of this story ten years ago. I don’t recall a specific incident that inspired it, but I think it might have been a trip back to Honolulu from New York in the months following 9/11 that got the wheels turning, triggering a memory of an encounter I’d had with a man who was in the army when I was in middle school. I’d gone to a reggae concert with a bunch of friends and he cornered me.
The one aspect of the initial draft of the story that has really stayed the same all these years is the ending. I knew this character was going to wind up where she does. I was always interested in her desire to “belong,” and the way in which these two characters from vastly different places share this longing, and how problematic that is in the context of militarism and settler colonialism in Hawai’i.
During the writing process, I struggled to piece together details from memory since I couldn’t access two of the major locations; nor could I contact the people who had shown or taken me to these places. Taking creative liberties with respect to locations and timelines in a place like Hawai’i was a very uncomfortable experience—but, as a good writing friend advised, I had to lean into the discomfort. The feeling was integral to the story.
Writing a teenager’s perspective was another challenge I wanted to meet. Her loneliness and the roots of it were important to explore, and while the adult writer part of me wanted to arm her with a stronger political consciousness, a sense of self, a friend she could trust, she just didn’t possess them at this point in her life.
SHIVANI MANGHNANI grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been recognized by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Instituto Sacatar, VONA, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Boston Review and Hyphen.
