On Artmaking, Reading as Craft, and Chlorine: Jade Song interviewed by JoAnna Mak

I met Jade Song in 2020 through a writing group, not long after they’d started writing their debut novel, Chlorine. In alternating accounts between Ren, a competitive high school swimmer, and Cathy, her best friend, the novel puts the dark horrors of adolescence into sharp focus – with freedom only made possible through a life in the water. Imaginative, bold, and defiant, Chlorine is as mythical as it is unapologetically honest.

“We Never Really Touch Anyone Because of Molecules”: Distance and Disconnect in Annie Christain’s The Vanguards of Holography (2021, Headmistress Press)

A hologram is an illusion. You think you’re looking at something three-dimensional and lifelike, but what you see is only an image, a reconstruction of reality rather than reality itself. What could be a more fitting image to encapsulate the illusoriness, isolation and distance that pervade collective life in this post-truth, post-Covid era—one in which facts are subsumed by beliefs and a screen avatar can stand in for a physical body? In her most recent collection of poems, The Vanguards of Holography, Annie Christain creates a pervasive sense of disconnection and disembodiment.