Myna Chang
Welcome to The Burning Hearth and my interview with Myna Chang, which, as you will note, I wrote the intro for last month. (I knew July was going to be busy.) I’m delighted she agreed to an interview and I’m happy to share it with you.
June 2023
Sitting on my patio this beautiful June morning, with my clematis in full bloom (they are my garden’s birthday present to me), I can’t help but reflect on the last year of my life. June 9th is the anniversary of my brother’s passing, and the distance between that moment and now has been filled with more life than I could ever expect death to produce. The more Parkinson’s robbed my brother of movement, contracting his limbs, and making it difficult to open his eyes, the more the chains of my familial inertia released allowing breath, mobility, and clarity to infuse my being once again. As a writer, I can’t help but look at the symbolism of my brother absorbing the contraction of thought, expression, and movement out of the atmosphere like a human vacuum, freeing me from the chains my parents had forged around my ankles in his name.
It is amazing the difference a year can make in a life. For me that difference has been immense. I’ve been reflecting on the many positive things that have happened in the first six months of 2023. A very unexpected occurrence has been discovering Myna Chang’s group Electric Sheep. Electric Sheep, a capped group of 25 members who meet regularly to discuss all things speculative, launched in February of 2021. As stated at Myna’s website, “Our goals are to have fun and celebrate speculative writers & the magazines that publish them.”
In 2022, Electric Sheep launched a speculative reading series that is open to the public twice annually. I was introduced to Electric Sheep this past April when I attended a reading. I’m delighted to say I am now a member, and even though I’ve barely set foot into Electric Sheep territory, I am excited to be a part of a group who is indeed having fun celebrating the speculative.
I thought it would be equally as fun to highlight Myna, Electric Sheep, and her latest book The Potential of Radio and Rain here at The Burning Hearth between episodes of “Echoes of Le Guin.”
A conversation with Myna Chang about Electric Sheep and her book
The Potential of Radio and Rain
BH: Myna, thank you so much for taking the time to be a part of The Burning Hearth. You’ve been heading/herding Electric Sheep for quite some time now. I love origin stories, and I would love to hear why and how Electric Sheep came into being.
MC: Thank you so much for inviting me to The Burning Hearth. I’m thrilled to be here! And thanks for your kind comments about Electric Sheep. The group lifts my spirits every week, and I’m extremely grateful for them. We got our start a few years ago in a discussion class offered by the wondrous Tara Campbell. It was so much fun to hang out with other speculative fans. I didn’t want the class to end. Several classmates felt the same way, so we decided to keep going on our own. It took a few months to figure out the best procedures to keep the group fresh and vibrant, but everyone pitched in with ideas and suggestions. We meet weekly to discuss spec stories or special topics. We also invite our featured authors to join us for a 30-minute Q&A. We’ve had more than 50 guest authors so far. We’ve also hosted several public readings featuring authors and guests from all over the world. We’ll keep going as long as we’re having fun.
BH: Your public reading in April was a stunner. First, you were so organized and kept the event moving, and yet it felt unhurried and calm. Second, it was a reading series without a weak link. I left the event thinking what good writers and readers they all were. I know this is going to sound weird, but it felt like an adult forum. And I’m not talking about the content of the stories. Maybe, professional is more the word I’m looking for. But it wasn’t stiff and uptight. It was relaxed and respectful. Oddly, my question has nothing to do with what I’ve just mentioned. My question is this: Who would you most like to land for a reading or a guest appearance at a regular meeting and why?
MC: This is a great question. And the answer varies from day to day. I’ve been amazed by the variety of authors that are willing – and excited! – to meet with us. In the beginning, I was shy about inviting “big” writers, but I’ve (mostly) gotten over that. Almost everyone I’ve contacted has responded positively, and several of them have joined the group as regular members. It’s very cool, imo. The guests I haven’t had great luck with (yet) are the prominent magazine editors. I try to invite one editor every quarter, and I’ll forever be a fan of the folks who have said “yes” and joined us for a Q&A session. I think it speaks to their focus on connecting with writers and furthering the speculative community. I’ll keep trying to reach them all.
BH: As a reader, I often wonder how deep a personal truth has traveled upward out of the core of the author to become words on the page. There is a way that an author leads up to a truth, or outlines its perimeters before centralizing it, that suggests how deeply the truth resides within them. In other words, one can only take a character as deep as they themselves have gone. (At least this is my belief.)
There are two lines from The Potential of Radio and Rain I have underlined that even upon finishing the book, they are the two out of all those underlined that have YES! beside them. They hit me hard because they are truths, I have uncovered from way down deep.
First, from the opening story “An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disasters, As Posited By the Teenage Girls of Clove County, Kansas.”
“…we decided, sometimes, a tornado is just what a town needs.”
Being from southeastern Iowa, I lived under the threat of tornadoes. My life was undone by a metaphorical tornado. Have you experienced the whirling, unhinged blowout of a metaphorical tornado that left you in a debris field? If so, how did (or did) the process of cleaning up and rebuilding make you come to realize the necessity, and potentially, the ultimate gift, of the destruction?
MC: Any time I talk about this story, I have to begin by saying that a real tornado is never a good thing. Anyone who has lived in Tornado Alley knows these storms are terrifying monsters. I grew up in a little Oklahoma farm town. “Alternate Theory” was inspired by a summer when I was in high school, when one of those monsters wiped out all the wheat in the county. The whole dynamic of our town changed, shifting (relative) power and money to different groups of people—for a few months. I wondered how it would look if things had really changed, permanently? What would happen if we could sweep away the old ways and begin again, with a fresh slate?
While writing and editing this piece, I channeled a lot of anger and frustration from the political climate in America. Beginning with the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, it has felt increasingly like the people I love are no longer safe here. We are under attack all the time, in one way or another. To me, wind storms are no longer the scariest thing out there; now political extremists are the terrifying monsters. I’ve yet to find a silver lining among these dark clouds. Maybe that’s why I am drawn to a metaphorical tornado here.
“An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disasters, As Posited By the Teenage Girls of Clove County, Kansas.”
Read by Myna Chang
Second, from “Dust Devil.”
“Wind is greedy, Grandma used to say. It’ll steal the tears from your eyes before you’re ready to let them go.”
The wind steals tears. People afraid of emotions rob themselves of their tears and others of their tears. Has the wind, or another, robbed you of your tears? If so, have you been able to reclaim them, shed them, and move on? Do you have certain emotions that are easier to write about than others? Excluding happiness, of course.
MC: I was very lucky growing up. My mother’s family never encouraged me to hide my emotions. My father’s family, on the other hand, was very strict and prim, and they didn’t seem to be happy people. It was easy for me to see which path to choose in that regard. As far as emotions that are easier to write about, I hadn’t considered it until one of my critique partners pointed out that I often write about escape. I was surprised to hear that! So, I looked back at my published pieces and saw that, yes, many of my characters are escaping from places they’ve outgrown. A second group of stories is heavy on nostalgia and longing for those very places. Maybe there’s a little conflict there?
“Dust Devil”
Read by Myna Chang
BH: Perhaps it is because the land is so exposed in the plains and always being tilled that there is, at least for me, an inherent rawness about the people who live in these landscapes. Everybody knows everybody. There are no secrets, and yet everyone has a secret. Everyone is exposed, fearing exposure. Talk to me about the distance needed to reach back into one’s history of place and create (or recreate) honestly the stories of that place’s inhabitants without judgement as you have so deftly done in The Potential of Radio and Rain.
MC: I’m happy to see “without judgement” in your question. Thank you. That is something I always strive for. I also like that you mention distance. I think I needed both time and physical distance to put my feelings into perspective, especially in considering my family history. Most of the stories in my collection are fiction, and most are not about my specific family or friends. Still, those experiences with them gave me a lot of inspiration. The shortgrass prairie is an unforgiving place to live, but my family did they best they could for each other. Looking back from a place of love made it possible for me to imagine how fictional characters might have fared in their stead.
BH: What are working on now?
MC: I’m working to level up my speculative writing. Science fiction was my first love—space opera, cyberpunk, the singularity. Though these are the stories I still crave, I find them so much more difficult to write. I hope I can improve my success in this area. Wish me luck!
The Burning Hearth most definitely wishes Myna luck on her future endeavors, and thanks her once again for stopping by for a wee chat.
Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain. Her writing has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton) and Best Small Fictions. Awards include the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction, the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction, the CutBank Books Chapbook Award, and the CRAFT Creative NonFiction Editor’s Choice Award. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series, reads and edits for several journals, and judges literary and speculative fiction contests. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.
As always, thank you for stopping by The Burning Hearth. It gives me great pleasure to bring the thoughts of others to my readers. I hope you enjoy reading these interviews as much as I enjoy doing them.
Stop by next month for my 4th installation of “Echoes of Le Guin” featuring author and academic Kylie Mirmohamadi. In September, I’ll be posting my second rotation of “Circling Saturn with David Naimon.”
Until next time,
Constance
Constance Malloy 