24 March, 2020: Chen Chen

Boston, USA


I have a pinned note in my notes app that’s just ways of saying no. There are three templates for emails. They all begin, Thank you for reaching out with this lovely request. Say, an event, a blurb, or a journal submission. Each template starts the same, then declines the specific request. In one draft I wrote, Thank you for getting in touch, which I’ve used in emails but have come to believe, yes, it sounds too intimate, too physical. I suppose reaching out has a similar vibe, but it’s more open-ended and process-oriented, a hand still in transit, whereas “getting in touch” implies one’s hand has already, decisively arrived. In any case, lovely is a lie. Sometimes. Not all requests are lovely; a number are, in fact, mundane. Or, irritating. At times, irritatingly mundane. Of course lately, I have not had to say no very much; the requests that turned into obligations, in some cases full-on contracts, have been cancelled and the fresh requests, well the few that have come in are for the fall, which feels like a faraway fantasyland. I am sad for many reasons. One silly-but-maybe-not-entirely reason is that I’d just started to feel more confident in saying no to things both lovely (just not for me at the moment) and mundanely irritating.

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities and a whole bunch of chapbooks. One of his earliest and most ecstatic infatuations was with Tuxedo Mask.