The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Donald Quist as our guest judge for this year’s Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, which is open to memoir excerpts, personal essays, narrative nonfiction, lyric essays, and other forms of literary…
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…
Grace Loh Prasad is a literary sister of mine in many ways. She is a good friend, fellow memoirist, and neighbor. We are both members of The Writers Grotto and The Ruby communities in San Francisco, and alumnae of…
Essay by Yvonne Conza • In Splinters, Leslie Jamison exposes a live nerve that makes vivid connections between emotions of motherhood, marriage, artistry, and selfhood. Alive and strengthened within this endeavor is Jamison’s iconic, singular awareness, that like her…
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” —Alasdair MacIntyre No one would talk. It was as…
By Beth Kephart • The writer of the memoir in pieces is an assembly artist—a hunter, a gatherer, an arranger, a culler, a keeper. They are not at work on a collection of essays loosely bound by voice, style,…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Ingrid Rojas Contreras as guest judge for our 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award. Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by Vogue, her first novel, Fruit of…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
Essay by Sam Risak • Author of a combined six books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, and president of the literary nonprofit Sweet: A Literary Confection, Ira Sukrungruang…
Fan Jou Suri Served at the end of a meal, fan jou suri isn’t a dessert. Or, technically, a soup. But for my brother and me, youngsters living in Boston in the early 1960s, parents pinching every penny, fan…
Food, for my extended family, is a cultural mainstay. We are that family who plans for dinner while eating lunch. We mark time by meal memory, as in, “The last time I saw you was when you cooked sticky rice meatballs!” We revel in taste and texture, eager to share new gustatory delights.
When we eat soup at banquet dinners, we hold our Chinese spoons with an index finger down the crease. I’m not sure why, other than I’m sure our grandmother made us. Ma-Ma—born and raised in the San Francisco Chinatown of the early 1900s—was quick to rap our tiny hands with her chopsticks when she caught us breaching any kind of table etiquette.
For this essay, I excised the short descriptions of soups that I’d written as bookmarks for my memoir-in-progress and used them as the backbone of a short essay that highlights formative stages of my life. Each soup represents a theme on opposing sides of the spectrum: scarcity vs. wealth, unfamiliarity vs. comfort. I chose soups to open each chapter of my memoir because soup, the first course in a traditional Chinese banquet, tantalizes the palate and portends the meal to come.
This essay begins in childhood, with basic themes: resources are limited; respect your elders. Over time, rigid Chinese family values give way to nuanced American family values, just as the strength of stone is weathered by water. The narratives lengthen in the last two parts when these themes converge into an imperfect whole.
In a way, my evolution as a writer mirrors the unfolding in my essay. I’ve been influenced by Philip Lopate, who told me, “Remember—essays should track the writer’s consciousness; they don’t need to have a point.” Left unsaid, but critical to the genre, was that the interrogation was the point, and it needed to be robust enough to elevate the prose above simple journaling. At first, the idea of posing unanswered questions clashed with my engineering training. Leaving things unexplained, up to the reader’s interpretation, felt lazy and unfinished, almost glib. What was the right answer? It took time—and the realization that in many situations, there are no right answers—to free myself from forcing an argument through to its “logical” conclusion.
Fortunately, that change in outlook made a huge difference in my writing style and in the breadth of topics I choose to write about. I can breathe a sigh of relief; I don’t need to be a subject expert. That ambiguity provides space for me to explore and discover, to test the boundaries of facts and feelings, to accept that I’m just one of many who seeks, through writing, to make sense of the world.
AMBER WONG is an environmental engineer in Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her firsthand knowledge about risks posed by hazardous waste sites, although usually not all in the same essay. Recent work has been published in Pangyrus, Creative Nonfiction, Stanford Magazine, The Plentitudes, and The Sunlight Press, among others. New work will appear in Fourteen Hills, under the gum tree, and the anthology The Pandemic Midlife Crisis: Gen X Women on the Brink. Amber earned an MFA from Lesley University and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University. She is currently working on a memoir.
