Making the Tongue Dry: An Interview with Prose Prize Finalist Jen Soriano

Jen Soriano is a Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between nonfiction, poetry and speculative fiction. Her chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry” was a finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize.  Her lyric essay “A Brief History of her Pain” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her essays have appeared in a number of journals including Waxwing, Pleiades and TAYO Literary Magazine. Jen is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at the Rainier Writing Workship, and lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA with her two favorite boys in the world.

I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: My first question is about genre. What do you consider the genre of “Making the Tongue Dry” to be? Elliptical prose? Creative Nonfiction? Something else? Also—does genre matter to you?

Soriano: Genre definitely matters to me, but not in the conventional sense. I care about the ways genre descriptions can work to help readers understand what they are reading. But I don’t care about genre as a rigid container that writers must fit our writing within.

So, to help readers understand my chapbook I guess I’d describe it as lyric essay and hybrid nonfiction. It’s important to me to name that it’s nonfiction because I’m deliberately trying to capture actuality on the page. Each essay in the chapbook grapples with an aspect of reality as I see it.

The title essay “Making the Tongue Dry” is a reflection on what I see to be the connections between capitalism and climate change. The essay “A Brief History of Her Pain” is an exploration of the centuries-long mistreatment of sick women and women healers.

I’d add “lyric” and “hybrid” to “essay” and “nonfiction” because although the chapbook is nonfiction, it’s not strictly nonfiction in the sense of reportage or even conventional memoir or essay. Judith Kitchen once wrote that for an essay to be lyric, there must be a lyre. I try to aspire to that sense of music in my nonfiction writing. And in terms of hybridity, the chapbook has moments of poetry, echoes of mythology, and quite a bit of speculation on possible new realities to come.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this… – Jen Soriano

Eppinger: The language used throughout this manuscript is fresh and immediate. Are your first drafts this alive? Wondering what your editing process is like, and if you have any advice to share on writing and/or editing.

Soriano: Thank you for saying so! I’m not sure I’d describe my first drafts as alive. More like … unruly.

I’ve worked with three mentors over the past three years—Julie Marie Wade, Kent Meyers and Barrie Jean Borich—who have all encouraged me to surrender to the freewrite of the first draft. That can be hard for me because I have kind of a controlling brain. But I’m learning to kick that controlling brain to the backseat and just let instinct allow words to tumble onto the page. The result is often pages upon pages of content that is less pleasantly meandering than it is a swampy, mucky, overflowing sort of primal goo.

So I guess my advice would be to restrain the thinking brain and allow your gut to exude onto the page. Then let that gut-goo sit for a few days or weeks before you climb back in and embrace it. Editing for me has felt like getting in all the way up to your hips and wading through the goo to fish out the gems.

Then I go to a corner away from the goo and hoard those gems; I start with them on a new blank page and try to follow their shine.

Eppinger: Big social issues come up in this manuscript—domestic violence, the creation of the atom bomb, the crisis in the lack of affordable housing and the drug trade are mentioned in Part 1, “Blow,” alone. Was it your intent to illuminate how implicated we all are in broader issues, or did they surprise you by creeping into your work?

Soriano: That was most definitely my intent, so I’m glad it came through. I’m delighted to hear your reflection on all the issues you saw come up in “Blow.” It’s interesting that you note the issue of domestic violence because that’s an example of an issue I didn’t intend to tackle, but that crept in because I was describing the actuality of what it was like to live below our landlord who also happened to be a druglord. In contrast, I did set out deliberately to juxtapose the creation of the atom bomb with the perpetuation of the drug trade to explore complicity in larger destructive cycles.

I would say I became a writer because of big social issues and so it follows that all of my writing will be about big social issues in some way. We are all shaped by and implicated in larger social issues, whether we realize it or not. And for me writing is a powerful tool to help us look at these issues in new ways.

There is so much wrong with this world that I have a deep desire to change, and writing about the need for change is one of the ways I can manage how painful it can be to be woke and moving through the world as a womxn of color. On the flipside of the same coin, writing on big issues is also one of my favorite ways to celebrate the power and resilience involved with moving through the world as a woke womxn of color.

Eppinger: I sense that this line in Part 2, “Making the Tongue Dry,” is a guidepost through the entire work: “Is this a natural human impulse? To desire bubbles even though they burst?” This project seems haunted by the need to pursue hope and beauty (an infant son is ever-present) even though the harsh world makes this seem futile. … Am I getting this right?

Soriano: Haunted is the perfect word. If there is any one thing that has driven this work, it is the haunting feeling I have as a new mother that I have an important role to play in setting examples for my son that will either encourage him to perpetuate harmful status quos, or encourage him to choose a different path. It’s a frightening sort of accountability.

And you’re right about the work exploring the twin impulses of destructiveness and the pursuit of beauty, and at the heart of this is hope for transformative change.

It’s not just the world that makes this scale of change futile, people make it seem futile. I mean, people often suck. Like what Gandhi supposedly said about how Western Civilization would be a good idea, it seems to me that humanity would be a good idea too.

The point in this work is that living with humanity is a choice. Especially at a time like this, when the government is growing increasingly sadistic, separating babies and toddlers from their parents, banning entire religious populations from entering the country, declaring open season for violent white racists, stripping women of the dignity to control our own bodies, we have to remember that we can still choose to live with integrity and to resist the currents that would have us throw our own humanity and others’ under the bus.

Eppinger: Finally, what are you working on now, and where can we get updates from you?

Soriano: I’m still looking for a publisher for the chapbook and have it circulating through a number of competitions. Speaking of hope, I’m still hopeful that I can land a press and get “Making the Tongue Dry” out there in the world!

I’m also working on turning my MFA thesis into a book manuscript. It’s about the human nervous system and how intergenerational trauma becomes imprinted in our nerves. My father was a neurosurgeon, and ironically I grew up with an altered nervous system which has recently been diagnosed as Central Sensitivity Syndrome, a hypersensitization of the central nervous system. In the book I trace this journey with my neurodivergent system back to impacts of Spanish, Japanese and American colonialism in the Philippines, and explore the ways that the science of neural plasticity and the research of Native American and Black American scholars can teach us lessons about how to reorganize society—toward no less than healing scars as deep as genocide, as deep as enslavement, as deep as cultural annihilation.

So yah, you know, just looking at some of the smaller social issues like that. Lightweight material.

I live for connection with readers so if folks want to connect, they can follow and message me on twitter or instagram @lionswrite or check out my website jensoriano.net.

 

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.