The Story That’s Not Being Told: Mimi Lok & Last of Her Name
Cheyenne Heckermann: Can you tell me about the journey toward publishing Last of Her Name?
Mimi Lok: It was long! I’d written earlier drafts of the stories over roughly a ten-year span, and spent about three years working on the collection in earnest — rewriting, discarding, organizing. I wanted to send it directly to presses I’d long admired, but every writer I knew told me to find an agent first. After sending the manuscript to various agencies, I learned that I could not get an agent without also having a novel in the works, and I had no novel at the time. So I went back to my original plan and sent it directly to editors. I was thrilled to sell the book to Kaya Press, who I’ve loved for years. Just over a year later, the book was released.
CH: What went into your decision to write “Wedding Night” with such distinct breaks and vignettes between sections?
ML: “Wedding Night” is a messed up love story between two very different people. It was written in a fragmentary way, with perspective shifts between the protagonists Wai Lan and Sing, and this sort of disembodied, omnipotent perspective. Since the nature of memory is key to this story, telling the story in fragments with a greater emphasis on mood and sensory details made more sense than a linear, smoothly coherent narrative.
CH: One of the pieces in Last of Her Name is a novella. Was there anything different in your process with “The Woman in the Closet?”
ML: With the novella I had a slightly clearer sense of the story than with the others, possibly because it was partly inspired by a real-life incident. The story follows Granny Ng, an elderly homeless woman who breaks into a young man’s home, and I was interested in following her closely over a substantial period of time and seeing how things unfold for her. I also knew how it would end on a surface level, but what it had in common with the other stories is that I still had to relinquish control of the story to the characters’ desires, needs, and impulses, and let things go where they needed to go in between. I knew the what but not the how.
CH: You make excellent use of perspective shifts in your short stories. What do you enjoy about having these shifts, and how do they influence your stories?
ML: Challenging what’s accepted as the default perspective, I hope, shakes up our idea of whose experiences and perspectives we privilege over others, whose we don’t consider but should, all of that. I’m always curious about the story that’s not being told, and even if we only get a glimpse of that, it reminds us of complexities and nuances beyond our immediate perception.
CH: What’s next for Mimi Lok? Is there anything that you’re working on that you can talk about?
ML: I am writing more stories, and also working on a novel.
Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last Of Her Name, published October 2019 by Kaya Press. Last of Her Name was recently shortlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut short story collection, and a 2020 Northern California Book Award. A story from the collection, “The Woman in the Closet,” was nominated for a 2020 National Magazine Award in Fiction with McSweeney’s Quarterly. Mimi is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, LitHub, Nimrod, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, the South China Morning Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel. Mimi is also the founding director and executive editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.
