In Ling Ma’s story collection Bliss Montage, Chinese American women hope for a similar Happy Interlude, if not a happy ending. The real story is what happens before and after the sequence, where women’s lives tear through the artifice. There’s no story to the Bliss Montage, no life, only rehearsed poses. I especially enjoy advising on full, in-progress drafts and helping to surface hidden gems.Film historian Jeanine Basinger coined the term “Bliss Montage” in her book A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 to describe the “Happy Interlude” that often interrupts old movies, where “the leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side.” This kind of joy - the kind that “almost never appears anywhere except in a woman’s film” - quickly passes her by. I hope to help students find ease with the seeming blindness of the creative process, and to channel their anxieties and obsessions on the page more fully. The drafts we produce ultimately informs us what we are trying to do.

It’s been my observation, however, that what the writer envisions as the story and the story itself are usually two different things.

The best part about starting out as a writer is the freedom to take risks and to make exuberant “failures.” Perhaps the initial drafts of any project seem like failures because more often than not, they don’t adhere to what we originally planned. Stories and excerpts have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and more. My work has received a Whiting Award, the Kirkus Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and an NEA fellowship. I am the author of two books of fiction - the novel Severance (2018) and the story collection Bliss Montage (2022), both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

My work draws inspiration from a variety of sources: the work of Kafka, the horror genre, the 90s/00s zine scene and blog traditions, contemporary art, and reality TV, to name a few. My work engages with capitalism, the body, Chinese-American diaspora, and the fantastical as it speaks to our secret fantasies and projections. I am a fiction writer operating in both speculative and realist modes.

Ling ma stories