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We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Lily Rex

In this month’s installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, Franchesca Nicole Lazaro speaks with Lily Rex about their poetry chapbook Little Planes (2024). Little Planes was released as a limited run of 200 handbound copies, some of which are still available for purchase directly from the author. In our current age of digital, digital, digital, Lily Rex’s DIY ethos directed towards physical media produced by human hands is a welcome breath of fresh air, if not a small revolutionary act. Little Planes is a short but powerful collection about “influential musicians who have died in plane crashes, such as Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, and Aaliyah.”

The cover is a hardbound copy. At the center are two design charts of a glider, one showing its side and the other its front. An amber-colored violin sits to the left of the composition. Three yellow stars loosely decorate the picture.

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro: Little Planes is rooted in a very specific kind of American grief: the musician who dies young in a small plane crash. What drew you to this particular lens for exploring loss and legacy?

Lily Rex: The concept for Little Planes started over a decade ago, with the refrain in the title poem. It came to me while I was listening to some Patsy Cline and studying at undergrad. American culture places premiums on youth and celebrity, quickly granting mythic status to people who are perceived as gifted by God, the universe, or another higher power of choice. In my study of American literature and history, I became interested in how this is at odds with the high value our culture also places on work ethic and individualism. There are really two concepts of the American Dream—one where we earn what we want, and another where we are simply born worthy, destined to receive.

FNL: The collection pays close attention to the non-famous people who died alongside stars, such as roadies, bodyguards, and makeup artists. What does it mean to you to center those figures?

LR: One of the questions I set out to answer with these poems was, “Why should we not romanticize our own lives, elevating certain stories to mythic status?” And my answer to that is: we should. The quality of a story is not in its glitz and glamor for me, but how it is told. I have an obsession about challenging my audience to consider the mundane in a different light, which I think is a hallmark both of country music’s influence on my process and my background in journalism. I can be observant to a fault. If you’ve ever happened to drop your fork or hug your waitress at a Waffle House while I was there, it’s in my journal for that day. To center people who work behind the scenes or with a degree of anonymity hopefully means that my readers will reflect on their own work in the world, expand their definition of art, and see the blurred line that I see between art and labor.

FNL: The title poem is written explicitly as a country song, complete with a refrain. What does the choice to open the collection in that form allow you to do that other poetic modes might not?

LR: Opening a poetry collection with a song is more of a soapbox moment for me than a stylistic tool. Though I have a much larger volume of work in poetry and prose, my first genre was songwriting. I started taking guitar lessons and wrote my first song when I was ten, heavily inspired by The Judds. I live in both the world of songwriting, which is more of a pop art, and the world of poetry, which is more niche and sometimes annoyingly pretentious. It brings me joy to stir the pot in the debate about what makes songs and poetry distinct from one another, both to convince self-proclaimed poetry haters that they actually do enjoy poetry through the argument that some songs are poems, and to advocate for the literary merit and historical significance of storytelling through song in academic settings. The beauty of self-publishing is I can do whatever I want.

FNL: The collection moves between Nashville, the Indiana Dunes, rural Mississippi, and the Bahamas. How does geography shape the way these elegies work?

LR: Grief knows no borders, but I believe that places contain multitudes, including grief, just like people do. I aim for the places I write about to feel like characters in and of themselves, to make people curious about the history of whatever ground they stand on, and urge them to consider the entire range of emotions and events that have given that place its personality and its power.

FNL: “Taylor Swift’s Private Jet” builds its argument through repetition and tall tales. What does that poem’s structure allow you to do that a more straightforward elegy wouldn’t?

LR: My approach to elegy is to make something new of memory, not just to rhyme and lament. Assigning a strict form to grief just doesn’t make sense to me. Grief is not manageable, linear, or neat. Why write about it as such? In an unsurprising turn, my favorite elegies are songs, such as Bob Dylan’s “The Death of Emmett Till” or the Indigo Girls’ “Virginia Woolf.” I would argue, and perhaps the poem argues, that that which we decide to repeat has power and gains more power every time it is retold.

FNL: Several poems imagine conversations with or about the inner lives of the deceased. How do you think about the ethics of speaking for or alongside the dead?

LR: I don’t believe in speaking for the dead (unless I knew them very well), but I do believe in speaking about the dead. How else can we preserve history? In this collection, I have focused on documented history, my reverence for the art in question and at times let the artists speak for themselves through their work, such as “Conversation Between Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Texas Flood,” which is a found poem that makes use of phrases from SRV’s own songs.

FNL: The collection closes with the image of dead musicians reincarnated as cardinals in ordinary places like truck stops, backyard swings. What guided your decision to end there, and what drew you specifically to the cardinal as that closing image?

LR: I made a list of artists I wanted to write about when I started this project, and I wanted to present them chronologically. Some of them were old favorites of mine, like Patsy, but some were artists I wanted to learn more about. I found my way into some of the poems through my longstanding connection with the music. With some others, I found my entry point through immersing myself in new music or researching the artists’ lives. Aaliyah was slated to be the focus of the last poem because hers was the most recent death I wanted to write about.

I struggled to find an entry point in her music, in part because I was disturbed by the fact that she was reportedly given sedatives and carried onto the plane because she had been nervous to board. I started and failed to finish a few poems about her, torn between celebrating her art and addressing the violence and predatory truth of her story.

Her name is rarely printed without being attached to her most notorious abuser. A practice that every part of me, but especially the journalist in me, finds really repugnant. I decided that I wouldn’t add to that massive body of work where she is defined by what happened to her. I truly was sitting on my front porch, thinking about the common folklore of cardinals being visitors from another realm. I didn’t know that image would lead me to her when I started writing it, but my observation of the cardinals led me to think of her and took me to a place where I thought of her as vibrant, unburdened, and alive.

FNL: Is there anything else you’d like to speak to, or any upcoming releases, projects, or events you’d like to share?

LR: I plan to take Little Planes on the road eventually in the form of a hybrid show where I will alternate reading poems and covering songs by the artists I’ve researched. I have more plane crash poems, and wouldn’t rule out expanding it into a full-length collection someday. Right now, however, I’m finishing up a full-length collection of poems inspired by restaurant work and overlooked places/people.

Poet Lily Rex sits in front of a green, wooden door

Lily Rex (they/she) is a queer, working-class writer and musician. Their poetry, informed by fascinations with rivers, history, politics, and labor, has been featured by Bareknuckle Press, SALT Weekly, and Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten records. Their first chapbook Rivers Have Friends Too (2021) sold out of its initial run in its first month, and their second chapbook Little Planes (2024) is available now. Rex is an Indiana transplant living in Nashville, Tennessee.

A professional headshot of Franchesca Nicole Lazaro, a Filipino-American woman with short curly dark hair and bangs, smiling at the camera. She wears a dark brown button-up blouse and a brown skirt, accessorized with beaded bracelets and earrings. Her left hand is raised near her face in a relaxed pose. The photo is taken against a warm, brown-beige gradient background

Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with interests in developmental editing and book production. Her editorial practice focuses on literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction exploring history, technology, media studies, feminism, and literature. She has worked as an Editorial Intern and Reader at Brink Literary Project and joined Sundress Publications as an intern in January 2026. Based in Seattle, Washington, she is passionate about amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds.

Sundress Reads: Review of my mother is a mixed metaphor

A line-art sheep wearing spectacles reads a book while drinking a mug holding a hot beverage next to the Sundress Reads Logo

During a time when there is a distressing rise in conservative misogyny, Shivani Gupta’s debut chapbook my mother is a mixed metaphor (Rockwood Press, 2026) stands as a beautiful tribute to philogyny and motherhood. Through intimate metaphors and mindful details, Gupta scribes a narrative of a daughter growing into independence and her unabashed admiration for the woman who has loved her first: her mother.

The speaker clarifies that she is a daughter of an Indian family, following patriarchal traits with the expectations of a mother serving as a provider of comfort, a forgiving caregiver, and the rock for the family’s children. Another common characteristic of Indian motherhood throughout the chapbook is sharing food as a love language, one of my favorite examples expressed as “my mother’s love shows on my waist—climbs into / my rib cage, forms a protective layer around what i / tell her is my infallible heart.” (27)

In the chapbook’s titular poem, “mother as mixed metaphor,” these concepts are exquisitely depicted within the first four lines:

“my mother is a recliner with a massager,
heating & abundant side-pockets for snacks

overstuffed peanut butter & jelly sandwich
edges cut, well rounded, palatable to all ages” (7)

While the speaker often addresses her mother specifically, Gupta omits using “my mother” in her poems’ titles, acknowledging that there are certain histories which are inherited from generations before her.

In an Indian family, it’s not uncommon for mothers to watch as fathers “stand atop / spiraled staircases, ready for tripping / fortune waits for them / to give up before they arrive” (19). While the speaker’s own father “came back around / a chronic kind of sadness / his new normal” (25), it occurred after a childhood where “guilt breathed / into college son didn’t choose,” and “daughter… forever wears shirts oversized / comfort never fit right” (20).

By contrast, a mother’s thoughtfulness and compassion are dressed as quiet strengths comparable to forces of nature (“…almond eyes, wide, twisted and stormy,” “she is the life they mean when they say larger than life” (7)). How a mother “is juicy warm skies / torched at witching hour / gives light to another’s home.” (34) And then Gupta playfully zooms in to everyday treasures, where the speaker recalls her mother’s patience, how she “dialed the wrong number / often, but you were always listening” (26), or notes her mother’s tendency to hoard a mix-match collage, from ketchup packets, teatime biscuits, to birthday cards signed by the family. The speaker refers to herself as a “mirror” (16) of her mother, admiring and adoring their shared resilience, quirks, and origins.

Yet while she celebrates her mother and respects motherhood, noting that she is close to the age her mother gave birth to her—“freshly 30… with her almost 60” (28)—the speaker asserts that child-raising isn’t for her. Plainly, without metaphor, she states, “i will never hold something in me / that is younger, no version of us / to pass down” (10) and that “maternal instincts aren’t genetic” (13).

Despite her mother’s gentle pushing to give birth to grandchildren after the speaker’s marriage, the daughter remains firm in her decision to be childless. She is a tree “still branched / propelled into the future / with nieces and nephews,” (15), loving them and her choice as another legacy of hope for the women in their family, one she knows her mother—the one who always ate last at the dinner table—did not have a chance to experience in full. Respectfully, the speaker recognizes:

“i want to trust in my mother’s love
cocoon a closure, her lack of want
wrapped into a morning & a bite
of sun-blessed yolk—spilling, spilling, stop. (18)”

An adult daughter accepting her mother’s ways as “not stars, / but we are star adjacent,” (33) is a precious time of maturity that not all people can experience. Instead of causing conflict between them, the lack of personal want her mother has worries the daughter, who advocates for her mother to keep growing as a person without obligations to family, believing her mother will someday “shed mother layers / where the sea returns to ocean— / she will be born / again” (34).

I was deeply moved by the deceptive simplicity of the final poem, “mother as twenty questions,” a combination of sincere curiosity and existential inquiries. Zooming in and out of scope, the daughter encourages her mother to consider who she was before she had children, who she wishes to become, what she hopes to see. It’s a sweet window of perspective for her mother to consider, leaving the chapbook’s ending as part of an open-ended, ongoing conversation between them. I’m wondering how many selfless caregivers in this world may have needed to hear or ask themselves those same questions as well.

my mother is a mixed metaphor is Gupta’s delightful exploration into what women can be in life. I am grateful to read a chapbook where growing up isn’t always about the traumas or tragedies experienced; it can also be a jubilation of women’s choices and our forebearers, especially our mothers. Though I don’t share the same personal opinions regarding maternal instincts, I felt lighter as I read this wonderful ode to cisgender women. Whether they break the traditional family mold or not, women are capable of anything in Gupta’s poems.

my mother is a mixed metaphor is available from Rockwood Press

Heather Takenaga is a poet and writer born and raised in Riverside, CA. She is currently writing short stories and poetry. When she is not volunteering, she is drooling for cat cuddles, moonlit walks, and a reading vacation.

Sundress Reads: Review of Daddio: An Iterative Erasure

A cover of a book showing a man wearing white underwear, lounging on a brown couch, his right elbow on the arm. He is wearing a red hat. The title is "Daddio: An Iterative Erasure," placed on the top of the book. The author's name, MP Vare is written in the bottom.

MP Vare’s debut poetry chapbook, Daddio: An Iterative Erasure, was released from Bottlecap Press in 2025. Primarily a visual artist, MP Vare uses erasure, itself a type of visual poetry, and vast spans of negative space to display the effects of parental estrangement and pseudohostility. The source text is a bizarre letter addressed to the author by their father. This chapbook distills its source into uncomfortable, unspoken truths about neglect, absence, and legacy while holding the tension of a relationship that may never reach repair.

Throughout the text, child takes on ownership of the source material and the persona of the father to reclaim the role of “speaker.” The child figure is searching for the essentials of identity without the support of a stable parent, whose emotional needs swallow up all the air in a room. One poem immediately establishes an atmosphere of childlike self-soothing and self-discovery using the repetition of the lyric “I” and strings of affirmations: “I am / I like / I need / I can / I get” (Vare 16-17).Another comically reasserts the father’s ego with its own version of the self: “I / I and / I / and / so on… PS / I,” ultimately leaving “love you” unsaid (2-3). In perhaps the driest example of neglect, the poem “Corporeal” consists only of the word “Hey,” a passive greeting that represents the bare minimum of parental presence (18). The father-speaker justifies his tokenism with the aggrandizing conceit of “Walmart / more and more like / Notre Dame” followed by the resignation of “at least we have something” (14-15).

The ambiguity of child-speaker and father-speaker is perhaps the most compelling element of the chapbook, an unwarranted empathy and blurring of identity across generations. Which family member is left “wondering / still” only to realize “God / I’m invisible / look / they can’t see me. / This / continues / in spite of / me” (11, 25)? Which person feels “too weak / to be / me” (36)? Which one has “learned / to collect / debts,” and who is indebted to whom (5)? There is no right or wrong answer, as these are inherited sentiments. Just like the original letter, shame and loneliness are gifted from parent to child, a misguided attempt at alignment and understanding that result in comical conclusions such as “all of us nuts” (23). The disorder–both diagnostic and cosmic–that child-speaker and father-speaker share both unites and separates them, the very tension that binds these poems together.

However, child-speaker is grappling with more than what has been passed down. As the author explains in their author’s note, the medium of erasure not only represents their experience of sharing a bipolar 2 diagnosis with their father, but also the radiance of “what remains” despite the marginalization of trans* and chronically ill bodies (42). In other words, “Erasure encapsulates our estrangement” (42). The fragments of family found in these pages are physically disparate and scattered in space, but they make their own version of grammatical and semantic, even synaptic, sense, connected not only across but by the distance between them. Phrases like “they / even more / them” convey a sense of alienation and ostracization, but also gender euphoria and reinforced identity (39). Frugality and wonder flourish symbiotically when we are advised to “watch for / acorns / to become / homes” (20-21). Child-speaker still manages to extract wisdom and meaning from father-speaker’s disorganized legacy. Sardonic comments like “nice / antics… bail / love” could be an accusation of bailing on love, or an advisement to bail love out (28). By choosing to engage with the source text, the child-speaker gains valuable perspective, reflecting, “I was / away / from / me” and even declaring, “I own / my senses” (40, 29).

Whether the process of transmuting the letter into a poetry chapbook results in reconciliation is unclear. Now the reader is the one left “wondering / still” (11). The final poem, titled “In an Alternate Universe,” consists simply of a hypothetical harmony, brimming with longing: “I can call you / Daddy / still” (41). Even the unbroken insistence of reliability in “I can call you” feels somehow subjunctive. However, poetry and visual art alike rarely dabble in definitive resolutions, and if nothing else changed, both author and reader are transformed. The power of creating and engaging with art is in knowing, in the author’s terms, that “I’ll move through the world differently now, knowing I can do that” (42).

Daddio: An Iterative Erasure is available for purchase from Bottlecap Press

Zoe Korte is a queer and mad poet whose work has appeared in Roi Fainéant, Maudlin House, new words {press}, Foglifter, Room Magazine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. They have earned degrees in English, Spanish, and Ancient Greek from the University of Missouri. They live with their partner in St. Louis, where they work for Sundress Publications and the Missouri History Museum. You can find them on Instagram @zoekpoetry or Bluesky @mostlymosspoetry.

Meet Our New Intern: Emma Flores

An fair-skinned person, smiling while sitting on a rock, angled to the side, with a lake in the background. They have short black hair, light skin, and are wearing a sweater, jeans, and sunglasses.

If you asked me what my first love was, I’d tell you it was tarot. It’s the reflexive answer I’ve given for many years without much thought, as I talk about it so often that it’s all I’m ever known for. But it isn’t actually true. Before I even knew tarot existed, there was a much younger version of me who filled loose-leaf paper with stories that were reminiscent of the Dork Diaries series, fell asleep surrounded by a vibrant Magic Tree House book collection, and wanted nothing more than to become a published author. Tarot came later, but it came on so strong that it eclipsed everything before it.

I’ve always done tarot readings for anyone I meet. There was something satisfying about sitting across from someone and helping them reveal things about themselves they hadn’t quite understood yet. Doing a tarot reading for someone has always been a cherished practice of mine because I get to listen to their story in real time and help them see a way toward something better. To me, it felt like a more personal form of storytelling.

So when I went off to college, I had settled on being an English major because no coursework existed that matched the passion I had for tarot. Idly going through an array of Shakespeare and Romanticism classes, one class had me completely captivated: a course on ghost stories and folklore. I was fascinated by different oral traditions and the preservation of stories because people are compelled to share stories about cultures and histories that might stay hidden otherwise. 

That idea rearranged everything I knew about myself. My pull toward tarot and my pull toward literature started to feel like they were colliding. Both came from a need to uncover what goes unheard and a refusal to let it stay that way. It took me a while to trace tarot all the way back to that loose-leaf-paper-filling kid who wanted to be a writer one day. But I think they were always reaching for a way to hold on to stories that might otherwise go missing and to hand them to someone else with care.

My love for storytelling and amplifying voices that would otherwise be left unheard is why I was so drawn to what Sundress Publications does. I don’t come to literature and publishing with the same story that a lot of lifelong readers and writers share, and I thought that made my path unfit for working in publishing. Now I think it just means I found my way here through the belief that every story deserves someone willing to keep telling it.

Emma Flores is an undergraduate student at Binghamton University studying English. They have a particular interest in researching human behavior and society through storytelling, with a focus on cultural narratives and folklore. In their free time, Emma can be found doing tarot readings, wandering bookstores, or hunting down spiritual shops for the next deck to add to their growing collection. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Here on Earth

Here On Earth (NYQ Books 2026) is a raw collection of poetry that explores the hauntingly complex and beautiful experience that is life as we know it. Tony Gloeggler explores a system of themes regarding death, grief, health, aging, love, and familial ties, all of which are the most intricate yet humane ideologies we face at one point or another. The writing forms a vision about the growing pains that we experience throughout our lifetimes, brought on by connection and aging. 

To think of what the title Here On Earth meant is a powerful idea on its own; I mean, what do I experience here on this moving planet? How big and expansive, yet so small and connected? After my own pondering, I was instantly pulled into the work and hit with a powerful composition of human experience. This book allowed me to walk through the lens of another’s perspective, to feel their grief and nostalgia, and for a moment, it felt wholly my own. That is the praise I want to emphasize about the collection–that the work is unique in its own perspective but written in a way that conveys connectedness through the aspects of life that are familiar to most. I adored the simplicity of the storytelling that twists itself into the existential ideology of what it means to live.

One poem that embodied the way our lives are so interconnected yet uniquely different is “Still Alright.” The poem starts off with the mention of a friend who has a seemingly traditional family unit, experiencing the paternal phase where his children think they have outgrown the need for his love and advice. This is the part that captured my attention at first, something I have experienced in my lifetime: dodging my mother’s kisses and avoiding her guiding words, rejecting the idea that we still need our parents. It’s not until we grow a tad older that we realize how much we still need the comfort they bring us. This poem really is ingrained with that parental love, but also shows that it can be given and needed in a not-so-traditional example. This is seen in lines like:

sad as he talks about his kids
turning into teenagers, the girl
who won’t lean over in the front seat
to kiss his cheek when he drops

her off at school, afraid her friends
can see, his son no longer wanting
to play backyard basketball, a game
of HORSE, sitting at the dinner table,
head down staring at his phone, one
word answers seasoned with annoyance.

Following the stanza about his friend Tony, we are introduced to Jesse. Jesse is twenty-six and is autistic; our speaker has a paternal bond with him, doing his best to maintain the kind of consistency Jesse needs. Even though the prior relationship the author had with Jesse’s mother has long been gone, he was still a present parental figure to Jesse throughout his life until recently. In these lines we see why our author is no longer able to visit Jesse and how much of a toll it takes on him emotionally even though Jesse is not his biological son–“but I’m still thinking about Jesse and me, / his mom and her email saying I can’t visit him / anymore because I write about him. Poems / like this.” This causes a similar disconnect as Tony is having with his teenage children. I think it is a beautiful example of how the kind of parental bond is not exclusive to situational circumstances but outlasts the tests of time. Very well-written in the way comparing Tony’s traditional family and his own non-traditional version of fatherhood. “I think of talking to my friend, not / sure he will understand what Jesse means / to me or why I didn’t simply stop writing / about him like his mom asked, how inseparable / is my life’s story from my poems anyway?”

The entire collection is an ode to connectedness, allowing readers to find solace in relatable themes that can sometimes be hard to digest. It explores the unique identity and experiences the author has been through, while also showing the vulnerability of hardship. Reading about the encounters another person faces in their life allows room for introspection, finding similarities and complex distinctions in our lives. A lovely read for all those looking for community in their own grief. 

Order your copy from NYQ Books today!

Miranda Spurlock is 21 years old and a cat mom of one, but if you count the feral cats who use their charming manipulation on her (their cute faces), she is a cat mom of 4-8 on any given day. She loves the color pink; she is very fond of fairies and escaping into a book is what she does best. Spurlock prides herself on creativity and has tried almost every hobby there is to try. She is currently a senior at UTK where she is majoring in Business Management and minoring in English.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents October Xfit

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Rosa Castellano. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, October 25th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit.

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

The theme for October’s Xfit is Hauntings. Give yourself time to search for and interrogate the creatures that have been occupying your world. Feel free to question whether they scare or comfort you, how long they’ve been lingering, and if you want them to stay or to drive them out through writing.

Originally from Tampa, Fl, Rosa Castellano is the co-founder of the Richmond Poetry Festival and one of two Poet Laureates currently working on poetry projects for the City of Richmond VA. Her writing appears in Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Bomb, Write or Die, and Lit Hub among others. Her debut poetry collection, All is the Telling, is available now from Diode editions.

This event is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. 

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents Ghosting the Self: Writing Through What We Avoid

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Ghosting the Self: Writing Through What We Avoid,” a free writing workshop led by Jason Masino on Wednesday, October 14th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Register for the event today!

Every writer has subjects they circle but never quite touch. Sometimes it’s a memory, a contradiction, an obsession, or a version of themselves that doesn’t fit the story they’re trying to tell. In this generative workshop, we’ll explore the gaps, omissions, and recurring patterns that shape our work from the margins. Through discussion, close reflection, and writing exercises, participants will identify what they tend to avoid on the page and experiment with new approaches to writing through resistance rather than around it. Writers of all genres and experience levels are welcome.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly Jason Masino via Venmo: @Jason-Masino-5, PayPal: jason.masino@gmail.com, or Cash App: $JasonMasino1987

Jason Masino is a poet and program builder whose work explores identity, belonging, contradiction, and the uneasy process of living with the parts of ourselves we are taught to reject. He holds a BA from the University of California, Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University. His work has appeared in publications including Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and South Florida Poetry Journal. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and also works across higher education, public service, and community engagement.

This event is made possible by a generous grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Meet Our New Intern: Dia Manoj

When I was a child, my mom used to have me write short stories like I was training for a marathon, running endless miles around the figurative track.

Here is how it went: she would tell me to go write something, I would run off with some paper, and return with a sloppy fable about talking bears, to which she would give some vague praise and prompt me to go write another. I’m still not quite sure if her intent was to help me become a better writer, or to get me to stop pestering her for 15 minute intervals. It was probably both, but it’s something that I remain grateful for. Though that manuscript of Aesop knock-offs is now lost to time.

I’ve been deemed a “writer” for my whole life. It’s the first thing I mention when people ask me to “tell them a little bit about myself.” It’s the crux of my identity, but to be honest, I’ve never been completely assured of its meaning. A writer is not something you can finish becoming, like a runner practicing to win that one race. It’s also not something you can evaluate very easily skill-wise. I can’t track my speed or agility, and I can never really be sure if I am a “good writer.” Sure, I got high accolades from my parents and my teachers, but it was practically their jobs to be encouraging. So, really, how can you ever tell if what you’re putting down is worth anything? This question built an imprisoning sort of headspace that I caged myself into for much of my existence as a writer. I was constantly wondering the value of my work, and if it amounted at all to what the people around me were creating. Everything I made felt too derived, too underdeveloped, too forgettable.

I don’t know when exactly I started letting go of this (frankly, quite ridiculous) mentality, but I can say that my Introduction to Poetry Writing class I took two semesters ago certainly helped swing the door open. I was deeply enamored with this class; the opportunity to write poetry for critique from a group of fellow writers was incredibly valuable to me. I spent months crafting long-form narrative poems, inspired by the fairytale essence of Wilde’s The Star-Child, and brought them to class eager for feedback. But in the middle of that excitement, I felt that familiar fear crawling back: is what I’m writing good enough? Then, one of the other students in my class brought in his own narrative poem, similar in style to mine, and immediately, my brain broke out in questions like hives: Are our poems too similar? Is his better? Does mine amount to his at all?

On the last day of class, I got my answer in a way that humbled me. My professor told us about how he hoped we’d never see writing, or creating art, as a competition, and how it isn’t about being successful. As he was saying this, I almost felt embarrassed, because duh. The best part about writing is putting human experience into words, and somewhere along the line, all my anxiety had led me to have forgotten this; I had forgotten how much I enjoy just the act of writing itself, of running in laps around my mom with my fables. As long as I enjoyed the process, and if I was proud of my result, then really, that’s all that should matter. Not anyone else’s approval or anyone else’s work.

I can’t say that this epiphany has forever changed me. I still freak out over whether my metaphors are too clichéd, and I still sometimes panic over whether my work will be seen as “good” by others. But I’ve learned to stop letting those worries overtake the process, and to allow myself to enjoy what has always been one of my favorite parts of myself. So I’ll continue to write, and whether or not I’m eventually called a “good writer,” I’ll hopefully be proud of what I’ve created, and that will be enough.

An Indian woman with shoulder-length black hair poses in front of a doorway. She is wearing a white dress with blue flowers and a green pendant necklace. She is smiling at the camera.

Dia Manoj (she/her) is a lover of reading, writing, and coding. She is a junior at The University of Tennessee, double majoring in Computer Science and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She has developed several software projects, including an iOS app, and loves finding ways to combine her passion for storytelling and technology. She explores this fusion through her self-built writing website, diamanoj.com. Outside of her creative endeavors, she enjoys London fogs, vampires, and pestering her loved ones. 

Meet Our New Intern: Zie Madayag

In the Philippines, though not enshrined in the official constitution, you are required to pay your class treasurer—for whatever amount agreed upon—if you speak a sliver of Filipino. Slipping out even the smallest word of a particular thing you forgot to translate was unforgivable, even by accident. I can guarantee, maybe eighty-five percent, that most Filipinos who studied in either public or private schools had this odd and stifling rule of an “English only policy” in classrooms historically adapted from the legacy of American colonial education in the nation. It doesn’t begin in classrooms, of course. Often, I hear young children and my cousins speak perfect English—both in vocabulary and accent—yet fail to understand basic Filipino words. I wish I could say that it was the parents’ fault, but as the history of languages goes, it somehow always points toward colonization and its lingering afterlife in cultural and educational spaces.

When I told people I would be taking Comparative Literature in college, it was not a surprise to them. I sounded American and had no trace of a Filipino accent, I knew how to write creatively and academically in English and won awards for it, and I could converse seamlessly with anyone if need be. Sometimes, my friends and I would talk to each other in fake British and Irish accents, because it was fun and because it was practice. We even spoke English with botched French and Italian accents to see if we could pass as natives. When I decided to major in European Literature instead of Asian or Philippine, I was given nods of approval, leaving my decisions unquestioned.

Perhaps to them, Europe held a certain prestige that they didn’t see in the Philippines, that it could open doors for me to migrate abroad and become a permanent resident there. I wish I could say that it wasn’t for selfish reasons but parts of it were. I saw Europe as wider than where I was, that there was something deeper and richer to dig for. I was attracted to their literature more than I was to the books published in the Philippines. I knew many colleagues and professors who did their Masters and PhDs in the Americas or Europe and believed in the sophistication that foreign institutions could bring. I believed it through the decisions I made in college.

From the poems, plays, and fiction I write, English came easier. Forms felt looser, synonyms were instinctive, and creative imaginations seemed natural. In Filipino, writing is laborious, maybe even desire-laden. Words feel thicker, almost viscous, and fluid in a way that asks you to hold it solemnly. I am not twice divorced from the language when it’s Filipino I write and speak in. It’s intimate, private, something I return to when English exhausts or fails me. This was why, sometimes, when I was in class studying classical antiquities of Greece or Rome or modernism in Europe, shame and guilt would inevitably creep in. It would slither in the back of my head and ask me, “you know so much about the other side of the world. What about the one you’re currently in?” I reckon some of my friends felt the same feelings because when our thesis writing began, we would be asked: what is the relevance of your study to the Philippines? And we would answer with something else entirely in Polish, French, Irish, Norwegian, Spanish or Italian. Alienation, I learned, was sometimes self-inflicted.

Now, after graduating from college and continuing to hold tension between two languages, I open myself to the world I know and the world I study. English was a way to become-center, to meld with the majority. However, the margins, the minority, and the peripheral from which I come from is just as important, if not more. I admire the difficulty it takes for craft to take shape in Filipino, the sensibility and humor that rarely translates to English, and the porousness and permeability of language to sink, be swallowed, and bend, and still remain as potent as who speaks it. What emerges when you peel back the rinds are fragments of transition and mutability. In Sundress where marginalized voices are celebrated, I am honored to be part of these very fluctuations that metamorphose the sense beneath and beyond the text.

A brown Filipino woman with her hands behind her back, smiling in front of a brick-walled building. She has black hair and is wearing a gold necklace, and an ivory-colored dress with a green and maroon Sablay (or hand-woven sash) that has Indigenous geometric patterns and Baybayin characters, the official academic costume of the University of the Philippines.

Zie Madayag (she/her) is a writer and academic from Metro Manila. She is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature: European Literature at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has worked and volunteered at non-profit organizations and cultural institutions promoting artistic and literary production. Both critical and creative, her research interests include corporeality and materiality, spatio-temporal entanglements, ecologies, and the rhizomatic potentiality of the periphery.

Sundress Reads: Review of Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories

The cover of Horizon Hong Kong: Stories by Xu Xi, featuring large vertical orange and red gradient letters against a dark background. The words “Hong Kong” are arranged across the cover, with the author’s name, Xu Xi, near the bottom.

Looking at Hong Kong, what do you see? A city of neon lights and nightlife, one of the “Four Asian Tigers,” a place with over a century of history marked by colonial rule and war, or the birthplace of so-called Chinese culture and cinema? A jumble of terms has woven a dazzling cage around Hong Kong with language. In Xu Xi’s new book Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories (Gaudy Boy, 2026), she invites us to step beyond the confines of language and stereotypes, setting out from Hong Kong’s horizon to discover the real Hong Kong. This horizon does not draw on vast historical, geopolitical, or anthropological contexts; it begins with the world of real individuals, continually shifting according to who is looking, remembering, leaving, returning, or speaking–all to pose one ultimate question: Who are we, and where do we come from?

Published in 2026, Horizon Hong Kong is a collection of 22 short stories by Xu Xi, selected from five of her earlier collections. Echoing Xu Xi’s identity as an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong and writing in English, the book moves across colonial Hong Kong, the 1997 Handover, post-handover life, migration, and speculative futures, shifting major historical events toward the edges of the frame and letting private memory, family conflict, labor, desire, and loss occupy the center.

Xu Xi’s most persistent intervention is a change of scale: events that appear “historical” in retrospect are experienced by her characters through much smaller, personal dramas. Set against the 1966 Star Ferry protests, “Democracy” follows sixteen-year-old Patricia Chow through a contentious Girl Guides election, letting a schoolgirl vote echo the city’s larger uncertainties about representation and majority rule. In the story, the majority’s choice is emotional, personal, but legitimate, redefining the flat identification of “democracy.” Similarly, “Insignificant Moments in the History of Hong Kong” places the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong beside Lam Yam Kuen’s memories of his family; the fireworks marking the transfer of sovereignty occupy less narrative space than family memory, food, work, and the image of a rabbit on the moon. Interestingly, Patricia teaches 1997 in a seminar named “Significant Moments in the History of Hong Kong,” while Yam Kuen’s story is named “Insignificant Moments.” Together, they question “significant” and “history,” hollow words that appear at the horizon of the world but not at the horizon of individuals. Regimes still argue over how to write that history, but those who lived through it are captured in these “insignificant” moments, where a simple label for a piece of land was transformed into a real experience imbued with human warmth.

Horizon Hong Kong also interprets grand historical events through the eyes of the individual. Seen through nine-year-old Ai-Lin, the story “Chung King Mansion” turns Tsimshatsui and the history of the Vietnam War into a landscape of sailors, languages, family tensions, and half-understood adult sexuality. Ai-Lin is fascinated with an orange-haired sex worker but soon gives up when she encounters that woman without makeup, carrying groceries; she realizes the glamorous “lady” she imagined is no more than a girl herself. The power of her perspective lies in the gap between what she sees and what she understands; history reaches her before she possesses the language to call it history. Xu Xi employs concrete detail, those battleships, sailors’ uniforms, dyed hair, and translations between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, to preserve Hong Kong beyond historical exposition as a sensory memory.

The final question Xu Xi addresses is how Hong Kongers view their history from their own horizon. “The 15th Annual Anniversary” follows Christopher Woo into a reunion with elite schoolmates whose successful lives contrast sharply with his own; the evening celebrates political and social succession, but Christopher’s thoughts return to the years he spent caring for his mother, turning a public anniversary into an account of private obligation, class decline, and grief. As Xu Xi writes, “It was succession, this life of the elite.” (225) Closing the collection, “TST” gives the final word to the ghost of a former bar girl from Tsimshatsu’s Seven Sisters Club, whose violent death was falsely recorded, representing a marginalized life never accepted into public history. As her world disappears, she continues telling the stories of women like herself. Storytelling does not merely supplement history; for some lives, it is the only history available.

Xu Xi’s writing technique also makes this book a richly layered reading experience. She employs a child narrator, second person, an unreliable narrator, and even a dead person, presenting a wide range of perspectives. No single voice can represent Hong Kong, so Xu Xi constantly shifts narrators, genres, registers, and settings. Hong Kong always resembles a horizon, constantly shifting, politically renamed, distanced by migration, and brought back by memory. It is never a fixed homeland nor merely a victim of colonialism or postcolonialism but is composed of many people who are contradictory and cannot even represent one another. 

Reading this book as someone who is also from Asia, uses Chinese but works in English, Horizon Hong Kong helped me reconstruct a complete and authentic picture of Hong Kong, allowing me to truly see the people behind its vast history. It also enabled me to find an answer about selfhood amidst the complexities of history, personal memory, and marginalized narratives. This is a book of portraits as inclusive and multifaceted as a prism; in its pages, you can see both Hong Kong and yourself.

“Listen, it’s never too late. Just listen.” (281)

A young woman lies on a patterned pillow in dim, soft light. She has straight dark hair with bangs, glossy lips, and is wearing a light floral top while resting one hand near her shoulder.

Ziyi Zhong (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Alberta, both in East Asian Studies. With a background spanning Asia and Canada, she is interested in identity, belonging, and the ways literature helps us understand ourselves and one another. For her, reading and writing have long been tools of inquiry and repair, turning difficult experience into meaning, and of connecting with others who are searching, in words, for a light of their own.