Kim Gek Lin Short, author of The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits and the forthcoming China Cowboy, is the focus of a fab interview-ish essay in InDigest, wherein she recounts the joy of sending work to TSky Press’s open reading period:
Christian Peet phoned me to say they’d like to publish it. I kept hoping I was not dreaming this conversation. Had I my druthers, Tarpaulin Sky was the press I would have chosen to publish this work. Why? I like their books and think that they have an identity I get as a reader. I feel this way about a number of small presses, but I had this hunch that if only one person in this world was going to love my book, it might be someone at TSKY.
Oh, and right she was.
Kim also details some of her experiences in writing The Bugging Watch, gives us a sneak peak at China Cowboy, and discusses that much-maligned-of-late concept, “hybridity”:
I didn’t set out to make these two books “hybrid.” And quite honestly I did not even use that term to describe my work until somewhat recently, after both books were well underway. And although I wonder about calling my books fiction-slash-poetry, because it is just as easy to call them not fiction and not poetry, I think it is a truthful designation. Also, the term hybrid alone can and should be problematic as a category. This is also why the term hybrid is so useful. Of course, there is always the thrill of creating a new category, and the danger of enacting rules. But whenever I read something that poses poetry on a categorical high horse in a big snooze purist way, I think: this book is a real asshole. . . .