How telling my story launched my life as a healthy human and writer — Anyone who saw me in my teens had to know something vital was amiss; I was drastically underweight and phobic about getting fat. Yet my mother vetoed my request to see a psychologist. She didn’t trust the Freudian brand of analysis that was current in the ’60s. She didn’t want…

Author of East-West novels and all sorts of nonfiction, ghostwriter, MFA advisor, former painter… and current photopainter! — Novels! If you love novels about Americans in Asia and Asians in America and the families that form between them, you may have read my fiction. In the 1990s I published two novels, Face and Cloud Mountain, based on my family’s mixed-race history and my examination of my own Chinese-American identity:

Indexed Quick Links here: — My Bio Race, Family, & Relationships Books, Writing & Creativity Psychology, Health & Wellness Photo Essays

Let Nabokov show you the way — The first time I ever heard the term subliminal coordinates, I was at the Sirenland Writers Conference, in a workshop with the incomparable fiction writer Jim Shepard, who also teaches at Williams College. Jim described subliminal coordinates as “coded signals that fire like neurons inside the text to tell what…

Prep your scenes like a painter for added depth — Last month I led a writing retreat with four writers, two working on fiction and two on memoir, in France. We spent a week together in the Haute Savoie, with Mont Blanc in the distance, and yes, it was heaven, yet somehow each morning we managed to focus intently on…

It’s not as impossible as you may think — I signed with my first literary agent in 1978, when I was fresh out of college. Ancient times, I know, and simpler, too. A writer friend stopped by my apartment, saw my manuscript, sent a copy to his agent, and within weeks the agent sold it. Granted, I did have…

A conversation about Anna May Wong and the history of Asians in Hollywood — One of the delights of writing for Medium and Substack is the opportunity to meet fellow writers who are on your wavelength. That’s how I got to know Katie Gee Salisbury: we’re both biracial writers of Asian descent, and we both write about Asian-American history. Katie, based in Brooklyn, is…

From MFA Lore’s Write On! Roundup #3 — Welcome to MFA Lore’s third Write On! Roundup. This is a feature of my newsletter Aimee Liu’s Legacy & Lore where you get to ask the questions that are currently vexing you in your writing life and I try to answer as best I can. This week‘s first question focuses…

A key question for every memoir writer — Many, if not most, memoir writers at some point wonder whether they should write their first-person story instead as a novel, perhaps in third-person. These options represent two layers of separation from the foundational experience, so let’s take them one at a time. 1. Should you write your story as a memoir, or as a novel? There’s no universal rule here, but first…