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.