You are a writer and you’ve been looking for that special contest that will recognize your talent because although you’re somewhat modest, you’re also quite competitive.

Here it is! Co-sponsored by the good people at Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Preeta Samarasan won this contest in 2007 and — holy shit! — now has her first novel out, Evening is the Whole Day!

I highly suggest you enter right now.

ENTER THE 2008 HYPHEN MAGAZINE/ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS’ WORKSHOP SHORT STORY CONTEST!

For more info go to: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/content/view/93/1/

Hyphen magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop are taking submissions for their 2008 Short Story Competition.
The winner pockets a $1,000 prize and has his or her story published in Hyphen magazine.

The winner of the 2007 Short Story Competition was Preeta Samarasan (for her story “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers”), whose debut novel Evening is the Whole Day will be published by Houghton-Mifflin later this year.

Writers of short fiction are encouraged to enter the 2008 Short Story Competition jointly sponsored by Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). The winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, publication in Hyphen magazine, a one-year subscription to Hyphen and a one-year membership to AAWW. Ten finalists shall also receive a one-year membership to AAWW and a one-year subscription to Hyphen.

The competition is open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada. To be eligible, manuscripts must be previously unpublished and in English. No email submissions allowed. Only authors who have not published a book-length prose fiction manuscript are eligible. The competition is limited to short works of fiction, including short stories, novellas and excerpts from novels; the latter must stand alone as a separate work. There is no required theme or page limit.

Submissions must be postmarked by Friday, July 11, 2008 and accompanied by a $10 entry fee per story. Please send four copies of your story using paper clips. Manuscripts will not be returned and will be acknowledged only if a SASE is provided. Include a cover letter with name, address, email, daytime telephone number and a 3-sentence bio. The story title and page number should be clearly labeled on each page of the submission. Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript, except on the cover letter. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double-spaced on 8 1/2 X 11 plain white paper. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Manuscripts may be under consideration elsewhere, but please notify us immediately if your story is accepted for publication. Hyphen retains first publication rights and the right to publish a portion of the story on its website. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

To enter the short story competition, please send submission to:

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2008 Short Story Competition
16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A
New York, NY 10001-3808

Make checks payable to “Asian American Writers’ Workshop.”

Entrants will be notified by or on Monday, Oct. 6, 2008.

Damn, did I milk this doorway for photos, or what?

Yo! Three things to announce.

1) “Super Hero Blues,” a short film by the amazing Greg Pak that I did a voice character for, has won a PBS award! It’s airing tomorrow (June 7) on TV or watch it here. Featured: amazingly transcendent actor Brian Nishii.

2) Looking for a writing class this summer in New York City? I highly suggest you enroll with me in what will surely be the class that ends all classes at the Asian American Writers Workshop and sets you on your way to being an independent and confident writer:

Saturdays, June 21-28, July 12 & 26, Aug 2-9, 12 - 2pm (6 sessions)
Summer Fiction Workshop with Ed Lin

It’s easy to bat around issues about character, plot, point of view, description, dialogue, setting, pacing, voice and theme (whew!) in terms of writing. But Ed Lin promises to spend as little time as possible talking about those concepts. The author of Waylaid (Kaya, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007) supports the idea that writing is akin to playing a musical instrument that no one else has ever seen or heard before and that the authors are generally right, even if they aren’t sure of what they are doing. Lin believes the best thing that can come out of a class is a group of colleagues who can continue reading each others’ work outside the class environment. If you don’t love and respect writing or are focused only on getting published, Lin doesn’t want you in his goddamned class. Ed Lin is the author of the novels Waylaid (Kaya Press, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007).

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Cost is $175/$150 for members

3) Also, I am now set to read in both Minneapolis and Exeter, N.H., in July! I can’t think of two cities closer to each other!

Monday July 14, 2008, 7:00 PM

The Loft Literary Center
Suite 200, Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415
612-215-2575

Wednesday July 16, 2008, 7:00 PM

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, NH 03833
603-778-9731

Yeah, I took lotsa pics in this doorway. . .

Check out my Shuffled! feature over on boston progress radio. I talk a leel ’bout six songs picked randomly from my vast music archive.

Artists covered include: Billy Bragg, Asobi Seksu, Taiyo Na, Bad Brains, Asian Dub Foundation and Yellow Rage. I speak of all of them in a rather irreverent tone meant to amuse more than inform.

I will actually be in Boston in July to do a reading, too, man!

I’d figured this would happen sooner or later.

During the Q&A at the Asia Society reading, I was called out by an elder stateswoman of Chinatown for being merely “an observer” not only of the place, but the time (1976).

Sure, I hadn’t grown up in Chinatown. Sure, I don’t understand Cantonese and my Mandarin sucks. But apart from that, she wanted to know when my parents and grandfather came over! Shit, my whole family was under attack for not having street cred!

So far, I had shown the manuscript people who had grown up in Chinatown during that time and got their OKs. Not that I was looking for approval. This Is a Bust is a novel — not a history of Chinatown and far from a sober, objective account.

I completely understand where this elder stateswoman was coming from. “You didn’t live through it, you didn’t experience it, so you can’t understand it.” Moreover, “You have no right to tell it!”

Ah, but if we live with the conceit that no one else can understand our experiences, our culture, our struggles, then we put up these protectionist walls and in turn we stop trying to understand other people. That attitude leads to wonderful things such as homophobia, segregation by sex, ethnicity and race, colonization and wars.

My aim as an artist is to forge understanding. I believe people can find themselves in the stories of other people, no matter how radically different the observer and subject seem to be.

I try to compromise as little as possible and I’ve rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in the past. I remember one woman standing up, asking me why I tried so hard to offend people with my book Waylaid. I don’t remember exactly what I said (something like, “the purpose of an artist isn’t to please”) but I do remember thinking, “Gee, I didn’t try that hard. . .”

In any case, the audience at Asia Society was great, and Helen Koh, Associate Director of Cultural Programs, rocked like an angel. John Woo, acting director of Asian Cinevision, was his wonderful self. Thank you so much for having me!

Me very funny.

Everyone in the New York City area has had many chances to see me read from This Is a Bust free of charge.

But if you want to see me read at the Asia Society on May 2nd, you’ll have to fork over at least $10.

The reading will be followed by what will likely be an extremely lively Q&A session.

Friday May 2, 2008, 7:00 PM

Asia Society
Friday Literary Salon
Asia Society and Museum
Auditorium
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York City
Cost: $10 members; $12 nonmembers; $10 students and seniors
212-517-ASIA

This campus looked like crap when I was here. Now it’s all clean!

I had been by before to walk through campus, hit up Koronet for a jumbo slice and some bad service attitude, but Tuesday was my first day back in an undergrad class in 17 years.

I got things going right by stopping at Tom’s Restaurant for a Broadway Special, an off-the-menu shake they make with coffee ice cream, some mint (I think) and other stuff. You order one of those and they know right away you’re an old-timer, pre-Seinfeld, maybe even pre-Suzanne Vega!

I walked into the class and introduced myself to Gary Okihiro. “Oh,” he said slowly, looking at my face like it was melting, “You’re here today?”

“Gary, don’t do this to me, man!” I thought. Turns out he had been sick, recovering from a cold, was a little disoriented.

The class seemed a little sleepy off the bat, so I hit ‘em with a selection of Waylaid that was chock full of F-bombs. That loosened them up. Then it was a few chapters of This Is a Bust, followed by a fun and fancy-free Q&A.

I mentioned how this asshole professor at Barnard claimed that I was making mistakes in my papers that a “native English speaker” wouldn’t have made. That was 20 years ago, but I heard from a number of students that similar incidents happened to them or people they knew just last year or this year.

I was psyched that there were three engineering majors there, but no Taiwanese or Taiwanese Americans. Why? “Are you Taiwanese but you buy into Chinese propaganda that you’re really Chinese?” The only responses were snorts.

It was strange being back as a lecturer to a school where I was such a lousy student (attitude-wise, not grade-wise). While I enjoyed talking with the eager participants in the class, I think I related best to the grumpy dude off to the side who slouched in his chair.

I’m coming back to Columbia, this time on the Barnard side, on April 30 for this thing.

Hey, this is kinda cool. Check out this short film, “Dry Clean Only,” done by my pal J.P. Chan. The dude behind the counter, played by the wonderful Aaron Yoo (who’s been in “21″ and “Disturbia”) is reading Waylaid in the beginning! How cool is that? It’s very cool. The dude in bloody clothes is played by the endlessly fascinating Debargo Sanyal.

The film was a part of the PBS Independent Lens Online Shorts Festival.

No, not here, the original site by Wall Street and ground zero. The one uptown.

Next week, on Tuesday, April 8, I’ll be heading back to my alma mater, Columbia University, to talk to Gary Okihiro’s class, which is called something like “Introduction to Asian American Studies.” Class is a little over an hour long, so I’ll just read for like 40 minutes or so and take questions from the students.

Tell ya something, when I was there (class of ‘91, mofo), a lot of the Asian clubs such as Asian Students Union and Chinese Students Club were totally run by conservative right-wing, asshole pre-med and pre-law jerks. I wonder if that’s still the case.

But two things tell me that Columbia’s way less whack now than when I was there: 1) There’s an Asian American studies major; 2) There’s a Taiwanese student group. Bring on the dou jiang and sao bing yo tiao!

Class was never quite like this.

Wow, this is weird. This is really weird. Some kids took parts of my first novel Waylaid, including an excerpt from the Charlie Chan Is Dead 2 anthology that was titled “Late Bloomer,” and made a 10-minute video out of it.

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why did you do this?

Kaya’s logo. Tony the Tiger says smoking is g-g-g-r-r-eat, kids!

Friday March 21, 2008, 7:30 PM

Barnes & Noble
Greenwich Village
396 Ave of the Americas (Sixth Avenue and 8th Street)
New York City
212-674-8780

My first reading at this big chain, which seems to be losing outlets in Manhattan as fast as the old Tower Records. Quick! Save this store!