Author Interview with Herself:

My forthcoming novel, Marimo, Mon Amour (University of Alabama/FC2), is about an obscure poet and dumpling-maker who lives with a pet moss ball, Marimo, in Alphabet City. She serves as the Minister of Loneliness under a futuristic regime governed by the Bureau of Misidentification, riddled by forbidden words, and plagued by absentia. Special thanks to Alvin Lu and Keith Powell, who accepted a chapter excerpt as the short story, “Xialongbao, My Love,” which appeared previously in Your Impossible Voice.

Zinger Zingiber, your narrator, lives with a marimo moss ball and becomes the self-appointed Minister of Loneliness. How did this quiet companionship and her invented ministry allow you to explore solitude and tenderness in an age of isolation?

Zinger’s companionship with her pet moss ball becomes an allegory for cohabiting with grief and stillness. The moss ball is emblematic of a small, rolling consciousness—one that absorbs light and time with patience. In a world silenced by a plague of absentia, she takes on the role of Minister of Loneliness to tend the unseen afflictions of separation. The position is imaginary, but its compassion is real: it teaches her, and by extension us, to hold life tenderly because it may dissolve without warning, a breath away from erasure.

The Bureau of Misidentification erases Zinger’s identity and bans her obscure books by default. What inspired this allegory of bureaucratic erasure and the loss of recognition in the information age?

The Bureau’s ban originated from a hypervigilant response to data migration and the failures of modern recordkeeping—a metaphor for the vanishing self amid algorithms and automated systems. Zinger’s deletion from the Registry mirrors how identity today can be reduced to indexing, metadata, and error codes. It satirizes the bureaucratic logic that confuses silence for compliance, misidentification for reality. When the Registry erases her name, what remains is the echo of a question that bureaucracy cannot recognize: Who decides which lives are legible?

You describe the story as taking place during “a plague of absentia” rather than naming the pandemic directly. What does this linguistic restraint reveal about your relationship to language and memory after crisis?

After the pandemic’s saturation of the vernacular lexicon—virus, plague, quarantine—language felt fatigued, emptied of resonance. By writing around the forbidden words, I wanted to recover creative intimacy with expression itself, to refresh meaning through circumlocution. “Absentia” names not only the disease’s physical absence but a spiritual and linguistic silence—the vanishing of clarity in human contact. Writing around the word virus allowed me to attend instead to the contagion of fear, bureaucracy, and loneliness that lingered longer than the illness itself.

In an allusion to a famous scene from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Zinger’s tongue quite literally sticks to the Palace of Crystal when she tries to mock utopia. How does this image of “sticking” relate to your ideas about freedom, questioning, and the limits of knowledge?

That moment is a fable about speech and paralysis. Zinger’s tongue, frozen to the crystal palace, becomes the site of both defiance and consequence—suggesting that critique and inquiry can bind us even as they liberate. She can only release herself by asking questions, which signals the paradox at the novella’s heart: intellectual freedom begins where interrogation is permitted. The frozen tongue is also a meditation on the limits of the information age—a reminder that vast knowledge does not guarantee understanding when questions become dangerous.

Food imagery—dumplings, paella, saffron, and the moss ball’s aquarium world—threads throughout Zinger’s reflections. How did these sensual details guide your meditation on grief, presence, and the small beauties of survival?

Food is a powerful form of life-giving sustenance, as it offers consolation and nourishment. Ironically, however, it also points to absence in the novel. During the anthropause, daily rituals like cooking became acts of remembrance for a world temporarily paused. The descriptions of flavor—crisp brussels sprouts, sizzling bacon, mussels in saffron—are longing made tangible, sensory anchors when the outside world grew inaccessible. The moss ball’s roly-poly roundness connects to Lauren Herschel’s image of grief: a ball in a box that never quite stops hitting the pain button; Herschel’s doctor used a simple visual analogy to help her manage her grief. As Zinger learns, grief doesn’t vanish; it rolls more gently, becoming part of the aquarium of imagination where life, in miniature, continues to drift and shimmer.

Your work often approaches philosophy through lyric metaphors—the Bureau of Misidentification, the Minister of Loneliness, the moss ball. How do you conceive the relationship between imagination and the moral or spiritual life in this novel?

Imagination, for me, is a moral practice—a way of seeing beyond self-preservation toward empathy. The Bureau and the Minister are comic bureaucratic inventions, but they illuminate real spiritual conditions: misidentification as alienation, and loneliness as both affliction and grace. Through imagination, Zinger transforms erasure into witness. Her world may be miniature, her sphere aquatic, but the act of imagination becomes redemptive. To dream, even unreliably, is a form of ethical remembrance, a way of testifying to human resilience amid absence.

You’ve spoken of influences from Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. How did these literary interlocutors shape the balance between the surreal and the philosophical in Zinger’s world?

Each of these writers finds meaning within estrangement—Kafka through the absurd, Murakami through magical realism’s cool dislocation, Ogawa through constraint and silence, Dostoevsky through moral delirium. Zinger inherits this lineage of interior exile: her plague of absentia is both surreal and existential. The ice-palace scene nods to Dostoevsky’s irony, while her companionship with a sentient moss ball echoes Ogawa’s domestic interiors and quiddities. From Murakami, she inherits the quiet pulse of absurd tenderness. These influences converge not as homage but as conversation—voices preserved in Zinger’s paisley “underground” notebook, resonating in a world where questions themselves are acts of grace.

How does this novel contemplate acts of censorship as part of the book’s ethical and artistic inquiry?

The redaction of “forbidden words,” then their subsequent inclusion in the little poems dispersed throughout the novel, was not imposed from outside but chosen from within—a voluntary silence that mirrors the novel’s meditation on absence. I wanted to explore how language itself can be numbed by repetition, emptied by overuse until it loses moral weight. By withholding those words, I sought to restore freshness to perception and let metaphor reopen meaning. This form of censorship is paradoxically liberating, even subversive: it resists linguistic fatigue and the bureaucratic flattening of experience. In Zinger’s world, even silence speaks—a refusal to repeat the liturgical vocabulary of crisis becomes its own inquiry into care, witness, and renewal. Perhaps the novel’s central paradox suggests that erasure, when chosen consciously, can also become an act of recovery and freedom.