Masters Series: Ling Ma

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the 2018 Kirkus Prize, the Whiting Award and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the 2022 short story collection Bliss Montage which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Story Prize. Ma’s Stories and excerpts have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and more. She has been, until recently as we discuss in the interview, an assistant professor of practice in the Arts at University of Chicago. Ling Ma was awarded a 2023 Windham Campbell prize for literature in the fiction category. She spoke to me from her home in Chicago where she lives with her family.

The conversation covers:

• the feeling when a story seems to come from beyond you
• the genesis of Severance and the feeling of anger about ‘work’
• working as a fact checker for Playboy magazine
• the space between realism and the absurd and how Ling plays here
• wanting to be an archeologist and the idea of ‘surfacing’ a story (similar to George Saunders’ ‘dropped orb’ that he discusses in our interview)
• how Ling guides workshopping processes in her creative writing classes
• putting boundaries around the ‘public’ side of being an author, including staying off social media
• how winning the Windham Campbell prize has changed Ling’s life (a prize also won by one of our previous guests Helen Garner)

Ling’s advice: There are no creative writing emergencies.

Ling’s recommended debut book: the short story collection Skinship by Yoon Choi