The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li, MFA. Vivian’s graduate thesis is an experimental slipstream novel entitled To You, in the Waves of the Future.
Vivian (@vivianlicreates) is a queer and neurodivergent Chinese-Canadian writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. She explores mental health, Chinese Philosophy, liminal identity in her slipstream and fantasy writing. She was Longlisted for The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize, a Finalist for The Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, and the author of Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You (845 Press). A Banff Centre alumnus and former PRISM international Prose Editor, she is the writer and director of three short films that have premiered internationally. Read her writing in The New Quarterly, QWERTY, The Fiddlehead, and Uncanny, among others.
To You, in the Waves of the Future is a slipstream novel about two sisters trying to save each other through time, with letters from the past, present, and future. The work engages with Chinese philosophical themes and literature as a magical system as well as experimental formatting to explore the wave-like and fragmentary nature of memory, depression, and childhood trauma. Gliding between timelines, the novel explores the potential of how an ambiguous utopia for people Othered by society could begin to be built, ultimately proposing how home, body, and voice can be communicated across intergenerational barriers, borders, and time.
Video: Vivian reads an excerpt of her novel
Contact
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