NONFICTION: You Write What You Read by Victoria Cho

Apogee Fiction Reader Victoria Cho has written a stunning piece, published this week on Luna Luna. Read an excerpt below. You can find the whole essay here. I didn’t consciously make my protagonists white when I began to write fiction. There were times I swore I didn’t think about my characters’ races. But really, they were white. Even when I claimed they were utter inventions of my imagination, removed from a context of race, I re-read my stories now and see how they really weren’t anything else. They were all cut from the same cloth. I wrote about a white man losing his daughter and a white boy wanting to be a cowboy. I had a white man tell his sister he was joining the army, a white man walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, and a white man recover from a nervous breakdown in an insane asylum. And then, I wrote white women. A white teen fought with her best friend, and a white woman ran away from home. A white girl befriended a white homeless woman. I am female and Asian-American. My parents emigrated from Korea in the Seventies. (I don’t ask them for the exact year because I...
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APOGEE ISSUE 06

Fiction a wig by Kiik Araki Kawaguchi Rebuke the Wind by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Tommy on the Bus by Norman Antonio Zelaya First Snow by Gemini Wahhaj Poetry Argumentum ad infinitem by Chase Berggrun Fermented Fruit Poem by Walter Ancarrow Soon Mus Come by Soyini Ayanna Forde Portrait of my Mother as Mystique from X-Men by Michelle Lin Two poems by Nina Puro Guatavita, La Dorada by Jennifer Tamayo I still cannot dress attractively without feeling that I am endangering myself by Cathy Linh Che North by the Taiwan Strait: One Nation, Two Systems by Karen An-Hwei Lee River by Leila Ortiz Torch Song by Derrick Austin Wallpapers or Every Time I Touch My Phone by Tyler Kline Nonfiction Nice Girl and Small Man by Victoria Brown The Rotting of the Sun by Chido Muchemwa The Heritage Room by Jerald Walker Things My Grandmother will Never Say by Tinghui Zhang Visual Artists Xaviera Simmons (Cover Art) Kaitlin Pomerantz Clemence Vazard Christian Newby Imran Perretta Kapwani Kiwanga Lizzie Gill Stacey Tyrell Stina Puotinen