Writer Wednesday: Isabel Yap

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California, London, and Boston. She holds a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 has served as Secretary for the Clarion Foundation. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her debut short story collection, Never Have I Ever, is out 2/23/2021 from Small Beer Press. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is https://isabelyap.com.

Isabel Yap. Photo courtesy of the author.

Today we’re chatting with Yap about her forthcoming collection, writing while Filipino, and believing in yourself (or getting out of your own way) …

Cover for Never Have I Ever. Art by Alexa Sharpe.

Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new story, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.”

Without context, what’s one of your favorite sentences in the book?

Humans make up wonderfully intricate rituals, pretend to have such control—but they easily devolve into animal longing, just heartbeats flaring in their cage of skin and bones.

What will readers learn about you as a person from reading your debut collection?

Well, this is a terrifying question! And the kind of thing that I’d love to turn back on the reader, as in: well, what do you think you know about me? Generally, I was trained to critique stories in terms of formalism: the author is dead. I believe authors should be taken at their word, and I’d like people to read these stories not really thinking about me at all. But one thing that did come to mind, looking at this question, is: I hope a lonely reader will feel a kindred spirit. A deeply felt, persistent loneliness is something I live with, even if I have the best family and friends anyone could really ask for. The struggle with that, and the different resolutions I see regarding it, are threaded all through the veins of this book.

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Out Now: “Last Bus to What’s Left of Albuquerque” at Kaleidotrope

Cover art by Shauna O’Meara

Kaleidotrope, a wonderful online magazine devoted to speculative fiction, published my story “Last Bus to What’s Left of Albuquerque” in their Summer 2018 issue. It’s an odd length — about 1700 words — and I was glad to see it picked up fairly quickly, on my first submission to Kaleidotrope. You never know, when you try something new or different with fiction, whether anyone else will see it in the same way you did, but Fred did. (He’s a great editor to work with; if you’re looking for a new market, I suggest sending your work his way.)

SFRevu Review said

Daymon Blue has finally been released from prison for going into debt for his daughter’s medical expenses. But what has he been released into? Another poignant tale.

I was thinking about what happens when people are released from prison, when I wrote this. How we expect most people to return to jail, how we don’t expect much good from them at all. Serving your time doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to, and the reasons why people end up arrested or imprisoned are rarely simple. We, Americans, in general, are committed to the prison system in a way few think about, and we’ve turned it into a profitable industry which is now creating new ways to punish people for being failed by society.

You can read it for free here. Please do let me know what you think, and tell your friends. Thank you!