Episode - 64 Meng Jin

Photo Credit: Andria Lo

I really enjoyed chatting with Meng Jin. She laughs easily and has a unique take on the world. You can catch up with her on Sunday, November 20 at the Miami Book Fair where she'll be on a panel with Dionne Irving, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

Her short story collection, Self-Portrait with Ghost, kept me guessing as a reader from the first page to the last. The characters in the 10 stories of this collection are linked by their loneliness and desire for connection. The notion of death is also ever present in these stories that Meng wrote during the first year of the pandemic. Many of the stories have speculative elements, and one pays tribute to three women who are giants in science fiction: Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vandana Singh.

Meng is also the author of the novel Little Gods and is a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard, her alma mater. Meng was born in Shanghai and immigrated to the United States as a child.

During our interview, Meng reveals...

- how the lockdown of March 2020 affected her writing

- why she's interested in death

- the role Butler, Le Guin, and Singh played in her introduction to science fiction

Click here to listen to the episode. You can help Meng and the show by purchasing Self-Portrait with Ghost on our site.

The first listener to reach out to us on Facebook on Twitter to tell us the author Meng enjoys whose prose has been described as "a souffle made out of light" will win a free copy of Self-Portrait with Ghost.

If you've won a ReadMore giveaway in the 90 days, you're ineligible. If we ever shared a grilled cheese at Antioch, you're probably ineligible. But we'll always be united by our green, biodegradable, graduation gowns.