Daphne Palasi Andreades is a writer from Queens, New York. Her short stories have been featured in Joyland, Kweli Journal, and Encounters. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA fiction program, where she was awarded the 2018 Henfield Prize and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She also received fellowships and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, where she won first place for the 2018 Voices of Color Prize, and other institutions. She is at work on a short story collection and several novellas. Her winning story in the 2019 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, “Brown Girls,” can be found here. It appears along with the runners-up in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Brown Girls?”
I started writing “Brown Girls” on my subway ride home from Manhattan to Brooklyn one evening. I remember the train passing the glittering lights of the Brooklyn Bridge and my journal balanced in my lap. I was sandwiched comfortably, anonymously, between two other tired New Yorkers. I’d had workshop earlier that day, and my professor, Elissa Schappell, said two pieces of advice that lodged in my brain: Don’t be afraid to take risks in your writing, and Write what only you could say. It was advice I needed to hear at that point in time; I’d been pursing art in an academic setting—the MFA—and the program had, ironically (or perhaps not-so-ironically), left me feeling creatively stifled. Elissa’s words reminded me of the thematic and formal risks I wanted, and absolutely needed, to take in my art. What she said helped me feel the freedom I needed to feel to begin “Brown Girls.” The five vignettes published here in the Kenyon Review are actually excerpts from a much longer novella.
Once I started writing “Brown Girls,” I quickly realized that it was an ode to second-generation immigrant women of color coming-of-age in Queens, New York—women with a background like my own. My parents immigrated to Queens from the Philippines in the 1990s and, of all the places they could’ve ended up, circumstances permitted them to plant roots in Queens, a place that is one of, if not the most, ethnically and linguistically diverse places in the US. My best friends growing up were also the daughters of working and middle-class immigrants from countries like Panama, Haiti, China, Bangladesh, and the Dominican Republic, to name a few. In “Brown Girls,” I was interested in using what I call the “choral” perspective, the “we,” to capture the broad range of experiences in diaspora.
How did you come up with the structure for this story? Is there a significance to the five sections, or were you simply going for brevity? Were you inspired by any other works as you were putting it together, or did it emerge on its own?
The five sections published in KR focus on the arc between the girls and the different men in their lives over time. But the longer novella explores other subjects such as the girls’ relationships to their families, their careers, and one another.
I was drawn to structuring “Brown Girls” using vignettes because I loved that it was a form that allowed me to leap through time and space; I wasn’t confined to a telling the story using a traditional, linear method. I also studied poetry before pursing fiction, and felt the compressed nature of vignettes allowed me to incorporate some of the qualities I admire in poetry: a close attention to imagery, a musicality in the language, and an experimentation with white space. Additionally, I felt that this fragmented form mirrored the fragmented experience that people of color and immigrants, from my observation, sometimes feel.
While writing “Brown Girls,” I drew inspiration from Julie Otsuka’s novel Buddha in the Attic, particularly Otsuka’s use of the choral perspective. Otsuka’s “we” is elastic, able to incorporate a wide range of experiences, yet also masterfully spotlight individual voices within that collective. I was also inspired by Claudia Rankine’s hybrid text Citizen, which represents people’s experiences with otherness, as well as explicit and implicit racism. Rankine writes in a way that makes these experiences visceral for the reader, and I wanted to find a way to achieve this effect in my novella. Another inspiration was Jayne Anne Philipps’s short story “El Paso.” I really admire Philipps’s language in this piece, how her imagery is both tender and brutal, with the de-familiarizing language of poetry. All of these authors—Otsuka, Rankine, and Philipps—are ones who inventively and boldly blur the boundaries between what others have categorized as “fiction” and “poetry.” Experiencing these authors’ work helped me feel the freedom to not feel confined by genre conventions.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
People-watching. I am fascinated and curious by the eclectic mix of individuals existing in my home city. I welcome the way that New York overloads my senses—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures give me a great deal to observe. I love being privy to the juxtapositions and unlikely combinations that my home city offers and find a weird thrill in observing the strange, idiosyncratic things that people do. Above all, I live for the challenge of using language to capture these sensations and experiences.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Some of the best writing advice I’ve received: Write what only you can write—don’t try to be anyone else. As mentioned above, creating art is synonymous to taking risks—whether that looks like saying what people know but don’t want to admit, or taking a risk in terms of form. Allow yourself to experiment, play, make a mess. And the piece of advice that’s most challenged me: Write what scares you.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m working on completing my short story collection, where “Brown Girls,” in novella form, appears. I’m also at work on the first draft of my novel. It’s a story that takes place in present-day Philippines and explores the War on Drugs. Right now, I’m following a character who, having immigrated to New York as a child, returns to the Philippines after many years. It’s a novel that (I think) is interested in exploring memory and the slippery, sometimes elusive idea of home.