HOLIDAY COCKTAILS!
Co-hosts Rajat Singh & Katie Yee
OUR FIRST IN-PERSON HOLIDAY COCKTAIL PARTY SINCE 2019!
Join alumni presenters Rajat Singh (Poetry, 2022, AAWW Margins Fellow) and Katie Yee (Fiction, 2022, AAWW Margins’ Fellow) for a night of festivities celebrating the successes of the year and ushering in our 50th year!
Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn and the associate editor at Literary Hub. She is currently a 2022 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop and was a 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, as well as a 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany, No Tokens, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Rajat Singh is a queer Punjabi-American writer living in Brooklyn, where he is at work on a novel. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Margins, The Believer, StoryQuarterly, Lapham’s Quarterly, LitHub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Offing, The Millions, and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where he is a 2022 Margins Fellow, as well as by the Spruceton Inn Residency, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and Lambda Literary.
Also featuring:
Faye Chiao & Tasha Gordon-Solomon (Composing, 2021) — video excepts from the 2022 showcase production of their musical Fountain of You
Emily Breeze (Playwriting, 2022) — three short video docudramas of life in residence
Sabrina Imbler (Nonfiction 2021) — short reading of 12/6 book release: How Far the Light Reaches: My Life in Ten Sea Creatures
Ly Tran (Nonfiction 2022, DVAN Fellow) — short reading from upcoming memoir
We asked Rajat and Katie a few questions about their experiences at Millay Arts this year :
Both of your residencies at Millay Arts were supported by the Asian American Writers Workshop, our longtime partner. Can you tell me a bit more about being a Margins Fellow and the effect the fellowship, and the residency, has had on your work?
KATIE: The Asian American Writers' Workshop has been so unbelievably supportive; I knew when I was lucky enough to get the Margins Fellowship that I would be receiving a ton of guidance through the publishing industry, but what I wasn't expecting was the network that came with it. It's been so wonderful to connect with my fellow Asian American writers—in this cohort and in cohorts past. I'm so grateful that the fellowship also granted me this time at Millay, which was my first residency. This uninterrupted, protected pocket of time was so special and productive.
RAJAT: Something I didn't expect about the Margins Fellowship was how it would afford me a kind of structure for thinking about myself as an artist this past year. In addition to the countless resources the program staff has made available to us, I've had the chance to pay attention to what I need as an artist, to understand how I work, and to trust in what I'm making. As the fellowship comes to an end, I'm seeing how writing at the margins means refusing that marginality necessitates being sidelined.
What did you work on while at Millay Arts?
KATIE: I'm working on a novel and a collection of short stories. The stories exist more in a magical realism realm; I found they were perfect things to tinker with at Millay, a place that exudes that kind of energy. I heard someone describe it as a "thin place," once—as in, the barrier between our world and the next felt very tenuous there, in a beautiful way.
(I'm also working on talking about my writing without rolling my eyes or doing air quotes. Millay was such a good place to practice that, because you're surrounded by artists who really are in the thick of their creation, who take their work seriously, and who genuinely want to know what you're up to, too.)
RAJAT: I spent a lot of time deciding how to use work that I'd drafted longhand into notebooks, months earlier, in my novel. Having those physical pages to return to meant that, rather than feeling stuck in my process, while at Millay, I could trust that everything I wanted to see in my novel I'd already brought with me to the residency, and that anything I wanted to create would emerge out of the solitude of my month in Austerlitz.
Both of you were in residence twice this year, staying for two-weeks each time; this meant you were part of two different cohorts each time. If I were to ask you a few adjectives to describe the similarities between the cohorts you were part of, what might they be?
KATIE: Both cohorts definitely shared a fun-loving, curious spirit. I think we mostly subscribed to a "work hard, play hard" ethos. We were balanced. We fell comfortably into a new routine: everyone debriefing their weird dreams over coffee and baked goods in the morning; breaking for the day's work (independent is another adjective that comes to mind); reconvening over dinner; unwinding with card games and movies and campfires into the evening; day trips to neighboring towns on the weekend. We did our work, but we also laughed a lot.
RAJAT: The greatest similarity overlapping across the cohorts I spent time with this year is the deep curiosity everyone shared; the interest and attention we held for one another's work was just one side of this curiosIty. For each artist retained their own sense of wonder for the world at large, which revealed itself most fully when we were immersed in nature—admiring the stars during a bonfire, gazing at the sweep of nature from the top of Harvey Mountain. The differences between us and between cohorts lay, therefore, in the questions we were asking in our work, and in the tools we used to explore the both our own inner landscape and that of the world itself.
The intimate size of Millay Arts forges friendships that last for decades. I know you are both Margins Fellows and have known one another before coming to Millay Arts. Can you speak about other friends/future collaborators that happened while you were at Steepletop?
KATIE: We couldn't have asked for a better group of humans! Honestly, every night at the dinner table, I was in awe at everyone's brilliance. Being a writer, I tend to spend a lot of time around other writers in my everyday life. It was so eye-opening to be in community with other artists: weavers and sculptors, composers and documentarians. It was a peek into other art forms, a look at new angles from which to tackle familiar questions. I learned so much about textile art, the erasure of Black historical figures, what exists in the space between musical notes. Each cohort had a share night, which was such an amazing thing to be a part of. I feel like Millay has introduced me to people whose work I feel invested in; one writer friend and I still send our works-in-progress to one another. Plus, the wide geographical net that Millay casts means I have couches to crash on across the states and in Brazil and Australia. (Right, guys?)
RAJAT: Millay afforded me the chance to commune with artists across disciplines, and I'm pleased to say that—in addition to a very thoughtful writer who also lives in Brooklyn and with whom I've been exchanging drafts of one another's work since we arrived back home—through conversations with a brilliant visual artist and with a bold filmmaker, I've learned so much about trusting myself and my own vision.
What's next?
KATIE: I guess I'll keep chipping away at both books, slowly but surely. I'll eagerly keep an eye out for the forthcoming works of my cohort and cheer them on. And I'll look forward to attending Millay's big 50th anniversary celebration, of course.
RAJAT: I'm pleased to be guest-editing a notebook for the Margins, featuring queer South Asian artists. The theme of the issue will be Mehfil: An Evening of Entertainment and Enchantment, to be published Summer 2023. Submissions are still open; more info is available here.
Favorite holiday cocktail?
KATIE: I drink spicy margaritas year-round.
RAJAT: Martini—bone dry and ice cold, with a twist of lime.