At Coldfront, poet Steven Karl interviews Tarpaulin Sky author Kim Gek Lin Short, who promptly outs her publisher Christian Peet’s habit of poaching authors from Caketrain, and discusses, in additon to China Cowboy and The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, a rather stunning variety of things including Mick Jagger, artists Dan Rhodes and Andrew Shuta, temporary Bell’s Palsy, a pre-empty-chair Clint Eastwood, vintage Hong Kong record label art & posters, Josephine Siao, Connie Chan, touring with Bruce Covey, and reading for “witty & wonderful” Reb Livingston and the No Tell Salon.
Short also says things like this:
Dreaming, being alienated, wondering who we are as individuals and as members of a race or nationality or gender—these qualities of self are inherent to all characters, or should be. These sorts of questions—what is human—confront all writers and hopefully, all readers. We read and write to learn about ourselves and the world—to develop our working theories of ontology, all to further our investigation into what is human. We can’t help it. We are like lumps of quartz refracting our own private Idahos. We are social and individualistic, and we’re violent and brutal, but also romantic—mutable thanatos-eros. Other things always come into play—memory and time, and their problems. Namely, unreliability.
All of which is just a tiny piece of why we love her.