Anelise Chen has a difficult time with her internet presence, it causes her a lot of anxiety, and she often feels incomplete, messy, like a sunset of eyeliner, or a raw egg cracked on a lumpy rock in a not so sweltering desert, so she asks your forgiveness if her writing is inconstant weather, because in the past, she has vacillated between “dry,” as in not drinking any alcohol, as in the opposite of a bateau ivre, which of course everyone wants to be, to “hysterical” and “lifeless” as in certain Alaskan ex-governors, to “torpid” and “seriously insane,” because birds and buses are always screeching in her apartment in Chinatown and she’s like “Mom, this soundtrack you got me isn’t comforting at all,” and Mom sends another one called “Buddha Sounds” and then “Meditation Garden” and then the landscape becomes more jagged and the altitude appropriate and the wind is whooshing through bamboo groves, picking up hints of lovely T’ang era flute songs. And this is how she ended up at NYU, getting an MFA in Fiction, like all the millions of kids with arrested development in the western world. You can find her online and elsewhere, probably walking around New York City, listening to books on tape.
All correspondence welcome! anelise@thehydramag.com
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