Contributor Confab: Kawai Shen
"Crises can be moments of acute clarity."
Kawai Shen’s website features a reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s iconic 1793 painting The Death of Marat alongside the all-caps dictum, “MAKE WRITING HURT AGAIN.” It’s a reminder that there are many different types of pain, some of which are necessary for growth and change. Kawai’s short poems in our first two issues of slips slips—along with her challenging and outspoken answers to our questions below—serve as a reminder, among other things, that giving pain (from loss, from injustice, from limitation) its due can bring us specificity, lucidity, and, ultimately, beauty.
ss: What do you see as the value of dialogue with people we don't agree with? What do you see as its limitations?
KS: Listening and talking to people who we aren't necessarily politically aligned with is the bread and butter of solidarity and coalition building. So for me, the greatest value of this isn't about vague notions of bridges of mutual understanding nor is it about debating family and friends over dinner tables for the sake of morality. It is about strategically building relationships of trust and collective power in campaigns of material change. Such work comes with obvious conflicts, costs, and limitations, but I would suggest weighing the demands of learning how to navigate the more acute limitations of working in solidarity against the demands of navigating a world without any solidarity at all.
ss: Name three writers, artists, or thinkers whose work you are in dialogue with, and tell us why you named them.
KS: Thank you for the opportunity to shout out contemporary writers! Both Larissa Diakiw's poignant essay on climate grief, “The World We're Losing” and Brontez Purnell's hilarious “Covid Sex Diaries” have directly influenced pieces in my book, Wavering Futures. If I may also reference a scene rather than an individual, I am constantly being inspired by writers and artists in the Montréal-Toronto corridor (with gratitude for all the work Metatron Press and In the Mood Magazine does to support these writers). It's not a formal group with a unified aesthetic vision but we do all seem to share an interest in formal experimentation and a desire to work outside of more established institutions and expectations.
ss: It's hard not to pretend that these are awful times. What are you doing to fight back? What are you doing to cope?
KS: Crises can be moments of acute clarity. They reveal whether what you have invested in, and how you have invested, can stand the test of adversity or not. I love that my friends will know exactly what kind of smutty book to give me to cheer me up.
See more of Kawai’s work at KawaiShen.com
Learn more about slips slips (including how to get a copy) at slipsslips.net
Submissions are open for issue #3 (Distractions)! Share your short-form written and visual work!
Yep. It's all about the smut.