17 Jun 2025 5 min read

How editing can be an act of love

Whenever I am able, I take online writing workshops to nourish both my writing practice and my teaching practice. Workshops I’ve taken include: literary translation, the elements of fiction, cross-genre memoir writing, visual poetry, how to teach poetry translation, disruption in the writing process. Workshops usually follow this format – lecture, reading and discussion, generative work based on the lecture and reading, and finally, some time at the end to share writing and ask questions. Most workshop experiences inspire me to read, write, and teach better, and the best workshops connect me with mentors and peers with whom I can continue to cultivate relationships. The literary translation workshop, for example, resulted in the formation of a translation collective that continued to meet regularly online and in person – across the globe! – when possible.

When I was younger, my impression of writers was that they were quirky and solitary and tended toward madness. That may still be true of a certain breed, but I’ve found that writers who are also teachers are incredibly generous, introverted connectors. Last year, I took a workshop with the writer Grace Loh Prasad, who had just published her memoir in essays, The Translator’s Daughter. By the end of our three hours together, I had pages filled with ideas and vignettes I had written under her guidance and a document she had compiled of essays and literary magazines and publishers that would be kind to the particular type of essays the participants in her workshop write (personal, lyric, hybrid). It was through this list that I was introduced to Seventh Wave, whose story begins –

“The first thing we built wasn’t a magazine, but a community.”

This ethos drew me in immediately. Writers present as shy and quiet, but we have a fire that burns inside and the way we release the heat is through writing and having intimate, honest conversations. Looking around Seventh Wave, I could see that the editors had translated this need into a publication and online space. It felt warm and engaging; the writing read like they were in conversation with each other; the issues felt important and urgent – not in a headline-news way, but a fundamental, human way.

I was moved when I read their next call for submissions for an issue they were titling, “Radical Futurity.” Calls for submissions can be open – constrained only by genre and length, not by theme – or thematic, like a collective prompt that writers and artists answer. Seventh Wave’s call read like a cross between a manifesto and a poem:

“For this issue, we are examining the building blocks that make up our society and considering how to dismantle them so that we might create anew. We already have the material; now, how do we repurpose it, hold onto each other as we do so, and move from a place of fugitivity* to redefine and redirect power? And how do we make space for nuance, which requires vulnerability and a deep knowing of each other? Tell us: What transforms responsibility from a burden into a sacred act of love? How can we keep showing up for each other in a world that would have us do otherwise? And how do we channel forward that which is overwhelming and alive, impossible and divine, mundane as the dirt and willing to endure?”

When we say we are moved, we usually mean that something inspires us emotionally, as when we are “moved to tears.” In Chinese, “to be moved” is 感動 – the character for emotion, followed by the character for move.

I felt moved to write, like a call to action. One of the main themes I’ve been writing around the last 10 years is inheritance; I have been holding onto my own list of questions, like worrying a pebble in my hand inside the dark of my jacket pocket: What are the things we inherit? Do we get a say? Do we deserve it, just because something is being passed down? What are the conversations we should have before and during this transference?

This particular question that Seventh Wave asked –

“What transforms responsibility from a burden into a sacred act of love?”

moved me to re-work an essay I had been working on and living with. I submitted what I had and received a response unlike any I’d ever received from a literary magazine. The editors didn’t address my writing merely as words on a page, they were already in dialogue with the questions my essay was trying to write towards (essay is derived from the French essai, which means “to try, to attempt”). It felt as though they’d picked up a thread my writing had left and were raveling me towards a discovery.

I worked with two editors – Briana Gwin, one of the senior editors at Seventh Wave and Joyce Chen, who is the co-founder of Seventh Wave, both of whom are accomplished writers. Over the course of the next four months, Briana, Joyce, and I continued our conversation around inheritance and the sidebar comments of the doc read like its own braided essay. Briana brought the perfect blend of macro/micro vision to the work, asking the big, deep questions I now associated with the Seventh Wave ethos and translating our discussions into the appropriate technical and grammatical formations on the page. Meanwhile, Joyce found little holes in my writing – like stitches that had been dropped in a piece of knitting – and offered ways to patch them up (with a phrase, a sentence, a story, another question). Sometimes, Joyce and Briana pinged suggestions back and forth to each other; I was certain that it wasn’t by chance the two of them were paired to work on my piece. Every decision and communication at Seventh Wave were intentional and full of care.

In the writing process, revision is not always the most pleasurable. People often talk about the solitary nature of writing and for me, I feel it most if I am revising a piece on my own; the frustration of seeing that something is blurry, but not being able to find its focus is amplified when you’re groping in the dark by yourself. It’s immensely helpful to have a guide, or simply having someone nearby who’s gently holding your elbow. My younger son, who is 15 years old, will often ask me to sit with him when he’s working on something new or difficult and I’ll help a little from the side, offer some conversation, while he does the work that needs to be done. The kind of editing that Briana and Joyce offered me felt like the most tender, thoughtful form of care. It felt like love.

I am so proud to share the essay I worked on for this issue of Seventh Wave Magazine: Radical Futurity, which went live last week. If you have the chance to read it, know that the piece was nurtured into the world with the help of Briana, Joyce, and the entire team at Seventh Wave. If you’re a fellow writer, I hope you’ll consider sharing your work with them.