"There is Still Singing in the Afterlife": An Interview with Books Editor JinJin Xu

For the latest in our micro-interviews series, I interviewed Jinjin Xu, the Books Editor at Washington Square Review. I spoke with her about the process of publishing reviews, and her chapbook, There Is Still Singing in The Afterlife. 

WSR: Could tell me a bit about your position as books editor at Washington Square Review, and what that entails? 

JinJin: I love reading reviews of all subjects, even though I feel a little blasphemous doing it before I’ve had the time to formulate my own thoughts about it. I’ve written film reviews prior to doing book reviews, and I feel like we are all trained to write reviews based on our academic careers.

I was a fiction editor my first year. I resist editing poetry when I am writing a lot, because the language of others easily bleeds into my own writing. Sometimes, I love the porousness of this, but because I am easily influenced and always uncertain, it can become hard to figure out what I am trying to say. 

WSR: So you don’t have the same problem with book reviews?

JinJin: No, and not with fiction either, perhaps because it hinges less on language. 

WSR: Yeah, and that’s a good thing to know about yourself, and your writing practice. 

JinJin: I became more interested in the review side of things when I was publishing the chapbook, and my publisher asked me to reach out to places to send ARCs for possible reviews. I’d never had to think about this process before, which was intimidating, and felt alien to writing the work. I enjoyed writing reviews, and now see their role in bringing recognition to books I’m excited about.  

WSR: What is Washington Square Review’s application process for book and chapbook reviews?

JinJin: Washington Square Review hasn’t previously accepted reviewers outside the MFA program. We are now open for book review submissions. Washington Square Review pivoted towards more web content during the pandemic, and by opening up review submissions, I hope to bring more outside views to the website. Bea, who is the Assistant Books Editor and I are on the reviews team.

WSR: That’s similar to what we’re doing with micro-interviews. 

I loved your chapbook. I’ve been reading it, and it’s gorgeous. How does visual art function in the chapbook? How do the way in which text and visual art are positioned on the page factor into your thinking? 

Image: JinJin Xu

JinJin: It’s not something I do consciously; I don’t try to make a poem visual, but it’s intuitive for me. That was actually a barrier for me entering poetry at first. I didn’t write what I considered a “real poem” until my last semester of college. 

I took an intro to poetry workshop my freshman year, and all we did was write sonnets and haiku; it was so alienating, and I felt so outside of poetry because what I wrote felt emotionally false. 

Then, my senior year, I was writing a fiction/nonfiction thesis, but the language kept taking off. I wasn’t consciously trying to make poems. They were just language teetering off. 

I didn’t know how to present words on the page visually. I didn’t know how to break them into lines; they always felt stilted, or artificial when I broke them. I couldn’t meld the visual and the language together; I felt stuck in this chasm. That was when I realized why my teacher was teaching us to write sonnets; it gave a frame for the line breaks. 

At the same time, I was taking this experimental film class, where I found a place for strange, fragmented language. Trihn T. Minh-Ha’s films really inspired me. Their simultaneous fragmentation felt necessary—and together, created something new. That’s when I understood how to present my poems on the page. 

WSR: I love hearing how that all came together for you. Are there any poets or writers who similarly influenced you?

JinJin: I was very influenced by Bhanu Khapil. I still am. I talk about her book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, all the time; I usually have it on my desk. It’s a book of prose poems, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels noisy and quiet at the same time. It broke my mind when I read it. 

The conceit is that she interviewed Indian women all over the world with twelve questions, and then she fractured the answers to make these pieces. 

The book contains evocative questions on the top of every page, such as, “What do you know about dismemberment?” “When was the last time you woke up without fear?” “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?”—they’re questions that always stay with you. 

The poems are answers to these questions, ostensibly answered by different women in different places. Once you read more, however, you realize it’s the same person speaking the whole time. 

That opened up something in me. It might have something to do with film, as well, the relationship between who is behind the camera, versus who is the subject itself. 

WSR: That’s something I’ve talked about a lot in my classes: thinking about the poem as a movie, and how you are the one shifting the camera, and what details you choose to zoom in switched on. 

Was the ordering of the chapbook intuitive? I know that can be a challenge with more visual poems. I don’t know if I grabbed a distinct narrative in your book, but I definitely felt an emotional arc.

JinJin: Yes, it was intuitive in that sense. I felt like I always knew the ordering of the poems. 

The heart of the book is the two poems I wrote for April, and her brother who passed away, titled “To Her Brother, Who Is Without Name” and “To Your Brother, Who Is Without Name.” Even though they’re only two poems, they’re heavy, and all the other poems gravitate toward them. Then, there are also two other “To Red Dust” sections, that I feel balance the middle. 

I think the biggest question for me was how to respect the poems for April and her brother. Those poems were very difficult to write; they took many iterations over the years, and I was constantly questioning why I felt the need to write them, to mourn him in such a way. Who was I writing for? 

I questioned my responsibilities to my friend, to those no longer here with us. Choosing what came before and after the poems was a difficult decision, almost impossible in a sense, because what else could I say? 

WSR: They’re beautiful poems, so they are definitely worth the time you’ve put into them. If you were to expand this to a full-length collection, how do you see it happening? Do you see those same poems at the center of it? 

JinJin: Yeah. I only turned in the final chapbook about two weeks ago, and I suddenly felt liberated, like I had permission to work on a full-length collection. I know you were working on a full-length for a while. It felt scary to me, and I didn’t allow myself to imagine it. But once I finished the chapbook manuscript, I felt its lack, like I knew exactly where it wanted to expand outwards into a full length.

I was resistant to publishing the poems as separate pieces for a long time, because they all spoke to each other. Finally putting them side by side felt like a sense of arrival. The full collection I’m working on expands the “To Red Dust” sections, hopefully into five or six sections. 

I think of chapbooks as these gems that you can sit down and read in one sitting. When I first handed in this chapbook, it was much longer, and had three emotional sections. My challenge was to cut them into one, coherent section. For the full length, I’m excited to think about the potential of multiple sections and arcs.

WSR: I can definitely see it expanding into multiple sections. I was really moved by the epigraph, which reads: 

"Inside each of these Boards," explained the Fairy, "are accumulated the registers with the records of all women of the whole world; of those who have passed away, as well as of those who have not as yet come into it, and you, with your mortal eyes and human body, could not possibly be allowed to know anything in anticipation." 

Where did this come from, and why did you choose it?

JinJin: It’s from Dream of the Red Chamber, which is one of the four classics in Chinese literature. It’s the birth of the study of authorship in China; it’s widely contested who wrote this book. Various editions have different marginal notes notating its authorship. 

I've never read it in full; it’s really long, and it’s the most difficult out of the four epics. But it’s also the most interesting, the most widely studied; there are whole “Redology” departments dedicated to the study of it. 

It was my grandmother's favorite book. She was illiterate until she got an education through the communists. I never met her, but this was the book she learned to read as an adult, and always recited to my dad. There are these memories that I feel like I inherited through my grandmother’s telling. But what attracts me most are these cyclings of fate. 

On the surface, the book is a romantic drama about a boy’s romance with the hundred women he lives with, but it also bends and subverts gender. Ultimately, it is a book of prayer, a Buddhist mantra of his transcendence from earthly life, from the world of “red dust.” Every time I read it, I am spurred to work on more “Red Dust” sections.

The fascinating thing about its authorship is that there are 120 chapters of the book. Cao Xueqin, the supposed writer, wrote the first 80 chapters, and based on the difference in language and plot, the last 40 chapters were written by another, anonymous person. The intrigue, though, is that in Chapter 5, where the epigraph is from, Cao has already set up everything that will happen. 

In a hallucinatory dream, Jiao BaoYu, the main character, is visited by a fairy, who shows him these drawers labeled with the names of every character in the book—each drawer contains a poem dictating their fate. Jia reads them to us, the reader, but throws a tantrum because he cannot understand them. 

The thing is, we cannot understand them either, because we’ve read them before their time is due. We can’t understand our fate even if it’s staring at us right in the face. So the contest over the last 40 chapters is about how they diverge from the fates predicted in chapter 5—with everyone interpreting the poems differently to predict how Cao meant to end the story. 

Of course, this is a false set-up—because how can we interpret the fate of another, before it happens? This is similar to how I think about poems, their ability to say what is unknown, even if the reader, and writer for that matter, might not understand it.