Catching up with 2024 Fiction Prize Winner Aelita Parker
October 8, 2024 | blog, news, Prizes
Aelita Parker is a Japanese and Irish American writer based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and her BA in psychology, religious studies, and Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania. Her short fiction, “Maybe a Lion” can be read in the 9th issue of the Vassar Review. She is currently editing her novel, Offering Child: a multiperspectival narrative exploring the price of one family’s devotion to a self-proclaimed Korean messiah and the cult he helms.
SP: When writing, how do you determine the feeling you want to convey for your reader?
AP: I try not to think about the reader until I’m revising. Even then I’m mostly considering whether I’ve provided enough or maybe too much information. And of course I want them to feel engaged. But to let my characters really live on the page—to let them make decisions in accordance with who they are, what they value, the situations they’re placed in—I can’t worry about the reader. I just hope that if something is exciting or terrifying or beautiful to the character, that it’ll evoke something for the reader too.
SP: The way Akiko internalizes trauma, and would-be trauma, causes a drastic turn in how she relates to her grandmother. What went into your decision to have Akiko draw a boundary with her grandmother?
AP: I think for children love is this really pure, beautiful, safe thing. It’s uncomplicated. But as we get older, relationships—even safe ones—can begin to turn. Love and touch can become a source of real danger. And this is something Akiko learns in a really dramatic and horrifying way. In an earlier draft Akiko feels really comforted by her grandmother at the end. And there’s something wonderful in that, and true—and certainly she does still find comfort in her grandmother—but now there’s fear built in too.
There’s a lot more discourse now on trauma and how it lives in the body. I definitely feel that. Sometimes I’ll be in a situation that’s reminiscent of something from my past and I’m physically shaking. Or I feel ill. I think with Akiko, as a result of this really traumatizing experience, she becomes almost physically unable to accept her grandmother’s love and affection. It doesn’t feel completely safe anymore. It’s tainted.
SP: Do you have a moment when you came to the realization that you are a writer?
AP: Recently I found this story I wrote maybe in second grade. And spelling aside (which I’m still embarrassingly bad at) I thought it was pretty good! It was about a girl and her father trying to paint the sky. And about failure and how that can turn into something beautiful. Looking back I recognize that there was always something I felt needed to come out. My father was sick my whole life and he died when I was four. I never saw anyone about it. Never really talked about it. So writing became for me this space to explore, and to try to work through pain and trauma. To try to soothe my anxieties or loneliness.
But you know I still struggle to call myself a “writer.” It feels like such a big proclamation! Something you have to earn. My husband says you’re a writer if you write just like you’re a runner if you run, and I think that’s true. You don’t have to be any good. You just have to do it. But you’ll probably get at least pretty good along the way.
SP: What advice would you give to a beginning fiction writer?
AP: You just have to write. Read and write. I wrote the first draft of my novel while I was working in admin at Columbia. I’d write in the notes app of my phone while on the 1 train to and from work. I’d write over my lunch breaks and then when I got home. The train is one of my favorite places to write. You don’t have service so there’s nothing to distract you.
SP: What does your revision process look like?
AP: It looks a little different for every story. In the case of “Rotten Teeth,” I probably did five or six drafts. I’d have someone read it and give me feedback, then I’d make changes in accordance with what felt right / true to the story. My husband read it first, then my sister, a friend from my MFA program, a director friend, and another MFA classmate. I don’t generally ask that many people to read, and in fact I think too much feedback can be a bad thing. The last person that read it gave me a lot of feedback, and I ended up totally slashing up the story. I’d gotten two rejections so I had it in my head that it wasn’t working. The next draft was 2K words shorter and it lost a lot of its soul in the process. Luckily I’d submitted to swamp pink before making those changes!
Right now I’m sending out a new story, “Water Child.” I just got a nice rejection from The New Yorker so I’m feeling pretty excited about it. But this one I only had two people read. Part of that is because I’d written the story in my MFA and I got a lot of feedback on the first draft, so I had notes already, but another big part is that I just feel more confident now editing my own work. It can be really hard to see your own writing clearly, even if you’re a good editor for other people. Because you have to learn distance. You can’t be too in love with the story because it’s yours, but you also can’t agonize over every sentence. You have to figure out when change is necessary and when to leave it alone.
SP: You write that Offering Child is a narrative that grapples with the family’s devotion to a self-proclaimed Korean messiah. In “Rotten Teeth” a father almost offers his daughter to a Japanese mob boss. How do you balance the tension of parent-child betrayals and empathy to the parents in your work?
AP: I think a fundamental task for writers is to have empathy for our characters. If you build someone that’s just there to be a punching bag, they’re not going to feel real or interesting or dynamic. The parents in my stories do inadvisable and sometimes awful things, but it’s not out of malice. In this story a lot of Akiko’s parents’ decisions are as a direct result of poverty. In the novel, one of the protagonists is doing what she believes is right for her children. She wants them to go to heaven. She wants to build the kingdom of heaven on Earth. But it makes her incapable of really seeing her children and what they actually need.
In minor or major ways I think this happens to everyone. You’re so focused on some core value, some major driver, that it blinds you to other equally, if not more, important realities.
You want to earn a lot of money so you can make a better life for your kids, but then you’re working all the time and they never see you.
By virtue of having that much power over another person—which parents do—especially over someone who has no power of their own, or at least no ability to change their circumstances in a major way—we’re destined, I think, to betray our children in some way or other. And I do have a lot of empathy for that. I don’t have kids, but I’m sure if I did I’d mess them up somehow, as much as I tried not to.
SP: How is the editing of your novel Offering Child coming along? Have there been any surprises?
AP: I think good?! I’m having fun rewriting it, but then sometimes I also feel really impatient because it’s like “ugh, I’ve already done this before!” But I love writing, and I’m discovering new things even five plus years later (I started working on the novel in 2018!) so that’s really fun too.
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