This January, I’ll be heading up to Taipei for two weeks, to be a writer in residence at the Taiwan Literature Base. Along with my Wind&Bones co-conspirator, Dr. Hannah Stevens, I’ll be spending two weeks on a joint writing project that we are calling Interweavings | 經緯: A Tapestry of Taiwan Stories. I’m interested in how identity is something that is woven from multiple threads, how even the depths of what we think of our selfhood is already implicated in the lives of others, in ways we can’t even begin to map. There’s a quote from Calvino from Six Memos for the Next Millennium that sums this up well:
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. (Calvino 1996, 124)
I’m interested in the way in which we are woven out of multiple passages — the books we have read, the people we have known. So this residency will be an opportunity to take a step back from my other projects, and just to write for the sake of writing, weaving and interweaving new stories born out of the experience of being an immigrant here in Taiwan.
