The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of memoir! We’re joined by Sienna Liu to discuss her new book-length essay, Specimen. Sienna is in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Artistic Director at The Writer’s Center.
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Sienna Liu is a writer and literary translator living in New York City. She’s the author of Square (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2022) and Food Porn (Game Over Books, 2024). Her translations (from English to Chinese) include Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2023), Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (forthcoming), Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (forthcoming), and a new translation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (forthcoming).
About the Book
Contaminated by literature and compelled by the impossibility of translating one another, two young lovers fall in love against their better judgment in Sienna Liu’s polyvocal book-length essay Specimen.
Through meetings and missives from Cape Town to Beijing to Paris to London, the lovers lie, fight, observe and analyze, write and re-write themselves for one another, only to find that their carefully constructed narrative has obtained a life of its own which overshadows and usurps their relationship. Weaving together years of diaries, notes, text messages, and memory, Specimen is an exploration of diaspora, nostalgia, writing, the creation of oneself through another, and time itself.
“Koi t-shirtsy, poetry-swooned, meta-anecdotal over a lover named E, Sienna Liu’s ‘four-dimensional rose’ Specimen is a blend of atmospheric nostalgia and bilingual love. Deprived of ‘sultry impatience,’ the essay, self-aware of its own making and quite unlike Anna Karenina, unequivocally moves through the vignettes of remorse like rainwater through a half-smoked cigarette. Love is hard to measure especially with the yardsticks of words, but Liu does it with effortless, erudite ease that one might wonder if she’s trapping a lightning bug of theory-based, archived memory within the pages of this essay, illuminating the translucency, emotionality, and philosophy of their elusive flutter. It’s such a sharp book that if you put it down you may risk feeling stupid.” —Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italy Letters
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