In this episode of SH@25, Editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li to discuss her foray into poetry, screenwriting, music composition and more, and also presents a reading of her two poems published in 2022, 'Ave Maria' and 'The Mezzanine'.

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Episode show notes:

• Visit Vivian's ⁠website⁠, or follow her on social media (⁠Bluesky⁠/⁠Instagram⁠)
• Read Vivian's poems 'Ave Maria' and 'The Mezzanine' ⁠in our archives⁠
• Find more links to Vivian's work, along with links to everything we talk about in this episode, as you read the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello, Strangers, and welcome to SH at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it's my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres. Today's guest, Vivian Li, was first published with us in 2022, and she also does art, and music, and fiction, and all the things. I'm super excited to dive into it all with her today. It's great to have you here, Vivian.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Thank you so much, Kat. It's such an honor to be here.

Kat Kourbeti: When we met at Glasgow 2024 this year, we were on a panel together and I said, I'm with Strange Horizons. And you were like, "I was published at Strange Horizons!" And it was just such a like joyful like, oh my God, I need to interview you. I need to hear about all the things that you do, because you're such a multi disciplined artist. You do so many different things, and I'm very interested in how it all gels together.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it was such a great time. Yeah, when I was moderating that panel, was it like Music in Anime, I think? It was just such a joy to be talking about anime music with everyone for, I think it was around an hour, and have people listening to us talk about music and anime for that long.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's phenomenal when you get to geek out about something with like minded people for however long, and having an audience is even better. And this is a little extended version of that. So for the listeners, I hope that they'll enjoy the various forms of geeking out that takes place on this podcast, because we do.

So, you are not just a writer; you do all the things. We'll dive into all your various publications and things, but first of all, the poems that you published with us were part of the art issue a couple of years ago. Two poems that are relatively short, and I'm sure that they're not the only poems you've written, but I want to hear about these poems in particular. How they came to be, what the idea was, or how you got to writing them, because the formats are very different as well. They're not the same between each other.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah, for sure. So, Ave Maria is like a prose poem, and it actually relates to a time when I fell in love with music, the moment I fell in love with music, because I didn't used to like music. I used to be forced to play piano by my mom, and I was learning these notes and reading the sheet music and I was like, "I don't like this, I don't know why I'm doing this". I think I talked about this when I was moderating the panel, but like, that moment I listened to this anime—I keep forgetting the title, but there's this anime where this girl who doesn't play any violin picks up this violin and immediately, it's like a magical violin. So then she starts playing concerto-like music and it's gorgeous, and it's the journey of her falling in love with music, but also the magic slowly wearing out from the violin, and balancing that aspect. And there was this duet between her and this other guy, and they were playing Ave Maria. And then, that was when I fell in love with music. And after that, I was like, I love music. Before that, I liked music, but I wasn't in love with it in that sense. And this poem is about the moment, when I think back to "what is my happy place? And how do I go back to that?" Like return to that moment?

And then The Mezzanine was kind of a reflection of personal experiences with my parents, but also... I was playing at that time Slime Rancher, and there's just elements I wanted to explore, of being in this weird world that you don't feel like you belong in, and you're dropped into the middle of it. But yeah, I definitely was imagining elements of Slime Rancher here, even though it doesn't really show up as much. So it's being inspired by what's around me, but I also wrote these in during my MFA at UBC. There were prompts like, we should write a prose poem. And I was like, I'm going to write about my experience of falling in love with music. And then I think The Mezzanine was more like, I need to share this feeling of feeling trapped, but also wanting to find a meaning in what I'm feeling right now.

I think I mentioned in the poem, the line, "when were you or I be loved?" And it's like trying to find a way to navigate that.

Kat Kourbeti: So I think the anime you're talking about with the violins, is called Nodame Cantabile.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. I think so.

Kat Kourbeti: It's quite a popular anime. I think there's a movie, I think there's a live action series—

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Oh, I didn't know there was a live action.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, definitely a TV series, maybe also a film. It's one of those like very encompassing josei anime that's aimed at young women, but it's for everybody, and it really took off. I remember I think it came out maybe like late 2000s or something. So yeah, quite a formative time.

I love when you can pinpoint a moment when you fall in love with your art or when you find something that you love a lot, and you can find that moment specifically. For me, I think it's a little more nebulous, but I'm always trying to capture, "I'm writing for teenage me". I'm trying to make her happy. So all the things that she loved to geek out about, those are the things that when I'm writing, it taps into that place of, I love doing this actually. So that's really beautiful.

So about the poetry publication and stuff, you've obviously written these for your MFA, they were just sitting there. What was the process of submitting to Strange Horizons?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I think I had heard about Strange Horizons from Augur folks. And also I read a few pieces and I really enjoyed them. I just saw there was an art issue call, and I just put in my submission and sent it out. And then I just forgot about it. Because every time I submit something, I forget. I like to forget. So if there's a rejection, which usually happens, I just go, "oh, I didn't remember this. Who was that? Who sent it? I don't know who that was."

Kat Kourbeti: "It's okay. It doesn't bother me. I've already forgotten about it."

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: But like when I get accepted, it's like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. It becomes a lot more exciting. So yeah, I guess it worked out.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm happy to hear different people's strategies of dealing with rejections, because honestly, it's a lot. For me, I always send things out to the markets that I know will send a quick rejection. Cause then it's like, alright, there we go, fine, done, next.

And a lot of the time, yeah, I think forgetting, or doing it and forgetting it, is great, cause no matter what happens, it's fine.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Like, it's not a bad turn of events. You got rejected, eh, alright, who cares, next. And if you get accepted—ooh, a gift from past me!

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah, exactly. That's how I do it.

Kat Kourbeti: Love that.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So I don't know very much about the dealings of the poetry department, but my guess is there isn't very much editing going on after they accept your poems, and then, maybe copy editing? I don't suspect that this changed very much from how it was when you wrote it.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. I think so. I think it was like a copy editing round and, I don't think there was a lot of edits, but that's poetry. I think I really enjoyed the process and it just, it was like a very smooth process.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that's good. No news is good news sometimes. Yeah, I think the general vibe I'm getting from a lot of these interviews is that we tend to just pick what we think works and then not really change anything about, whatever the art form is. So that's really lovely.

So then, obviously these aren't your only poems. Tell me a little bit about your MFA, your other writing. What formats are you drawn to chiefly? Do you experiment and stuff? What's your process, really?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah, so I guess it depends on the poem. I'm trying to do more experimental things now, where I'm doing like concrete poetry a little bit more, but, it just depends on the kind of image or mood or resonance I'm trying to bring to the poem. And I guess it just depends on what that subject matter is, what is it that I'm trying to convey and what's the best way to do that through the words and the writing, and the sound's very important to me. I feel like all poets, they're trying to find the right word. It's a lot about the sounds and the image and the mood, but also to play around with time, and have that temporal element be part of the structure, the format of the poem as well sometimes. I write something, whether it be like a poem or a fiction piece or a TV script or a feature film or whatever, I always like to think about, what is the core of this thing?

I feel like each one of them is like part of me, like, imagining them as one of my children. And it's like, well, what does my child need? What do they need to be complete? So thinking about it from that perspective and giving them what they need in terms of the writing or the structure, the stylistic elements. I think words and the sound of words is really important to me because whenever I hear a word, or whenever I read a word as well, there's an element of 'oh, I see the word', but I also feel like there's like a textural element and emotional element to that, so that's sometimes how I write through the feeling and through the quality of words. I try to link it together to another word that feels similar, whatever that emotion is.

Kat Kourbeti: I agree, especially in poetry, that the sound is super important. But I love that idea that you treat them like your children, and you feed them nourishing food and you give them whatever it is that they need to grow stronger and go out into the world. That's a beautiful way of thinking about your writing.

So how much would you say is poetry like your chief form of writing? Because I know that you dabble in other things. So what's the ratio?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I think of myself more as a fiction writer, honestly.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay, great.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: But I have more poems published than fiction.

Kat Kourbeti: That's the way it goes sometimes. Whatever is easiest.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I think the thing with poetry is that I do them a lot in between bigger projects. I write a lot of poems between bigger projects, like if I'm working on a novel. I'm still working, but yeah, when I was working on my novel.

Kat Kourbeti: It never stops.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: It never stops. That's so true. If I'm switching between projects because I just get stuck or I get like, how do I get this character to this from point A to point B? And I'm like, I don't know what's going on. So then I switch to another project. I don't know the exact ratio, but I feel like the reason why I like switching between things so much is because each genre has its own things that I have to really focus on.

For instance, in playwriting, I listen to the characters a lot more than I see them, and so that kind of listening to the dialogue and figuring out their voices and their cadence, I like to incorporate that in my fiction as well. Then I'm like, listening to the characters.

And then when I'm writing film, then I visualize things a lot more, and visualizing the way the scenes dissolve and characters move and everything, as a camera does, and then when I'm writing my fiction once again, I feel like I can see more of what I maybe couldn't have in the past. So I feel like I'm a fiction writer, because I feel like it's all serving my fiction writing in certain ways.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's really cool, using the different elements to help and serve the fiction or the other art forms. Fascinated about your playwriting and your film writing as well. Cause I feel like those are very different skill sets to prose writing. Whether or not you think in a visual way, the way that you put it all down on the page for other people to interpret, to then go off and make something that's more tangible than a fiction story, fascinates me very much.

So tell me a little bit about your scripts, but let's start with the theater work. What sort of plays do you write? Is there a speculative element?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. I think there's a speculative element to everything.

Kat Kourbeti: We love to see it.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. I mean, even my fiction, I feel like it starts off not thinking it's going to be speculative. For instance, the short story that was longlisted for the CBC short story prize last year, was a piece that was going to be very much about diaspora family. And then it became more about this bird that gives gifts, that's transferred through generations. So then I was like, okay I can't help exploring that.

In terms of my plays, I have that element as well. I have this one act that was performed or staged in some places in Vancouver. And then at one point I also acted as a character for one of our graduate college residence annual event. That was about a ghost coming to visit her brother during Qingming and talking through what their experiences were with their parents and like, that kind of ghostly element of, 'why didn't you visit me?' And it's that kind of interesting dynamic between estranged siblings. And so that was an interesting one that I enjoyed writing, and definitely had a very poetic element to it, because I struggled with depression. I still do. And so like, 'do you know how it feels to be like this?' It had that element as well.

The full act that I wrote in the Arts Club program, the LEAP level three program, which is where one writer gets to write their full length play, and then actors workshop it. And then they have a staged reading at the end of the year. And that was really cool. I had an all Asian cast in that play. And so many characters, but this is now the issue with production; if I wanted to produce it, I'd have to scale it down a lot and then prove that it's a viable thing to produce.

But, it was about three women in successive generations born in the Year of the Tiger, because there's the stereotype in China, especially in rural areas or older generations, that women born in the Year of the Tiger are stubborn. They're hard to marry off, they're aggressive, like it's not good to have a girl born in the Year of the Tiger basically. And then when I heard that I was interested, because I'm born in the Year of the Tiger, and apparently some parents avoid trying to have kids around the year before Year of the Tiger because they're like, 'Oh, we don't know what it's gonna be like, we don't know what they're gonna turn out to be.'

So yeah, it's really weird. So then I wrote about that, three women born in the Year of the Tiger descending into the Chinese underworld, to try and retrieve some element of their past or fix something in their past. It's about a grandmother, a mother, and daughter, and the grandmother has already passed away, so we have that element of the ghost also like leading them into the underworld. So I feel like ghosts feature a lot in my stories!

Kat Kourbeti: I love that.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. I wrote in the script, I was like, 'yeah, the tiger spirits!'. That's something I'm still figuring out. But with the TV script, it's called Ever Lost and it's this silk punk kind of TV script, about two women who later become lovers, but in the first episode, it was like, what their background is and they're struggling against, I guess this overarching ideological state apparatus, like this oppression and everything else.

And so it was exploring that world, but also the priestesses who govern this world and what does it mean to be a priestess in this world? And I also incorporate tattoos and what does it mean to have a tattoo versus not have a tattoo? A tattoo being a way to represent their soul, almost. But yeah, it was really fun script to write. Then it was a semi finalist for the Screencraft TV pilot competition. The film is something I'm working on and off on, because it was a script I started in Sheridan's class during my MFA at UBC, and it has a little bit less speculative elements honestly, but it plays a lot with memory, and moving back and forth between memory and time, and is an homage to my late grandmother, and dance kind of incorporates everything together. And actually I do, nevermind—I remember now. I do incorporate some spec. I think there's some mythology in there as well. So yeah, I think I always return to the spec!

Kat Kourbeti: I just find it really interesting how certain art forms really lend themselves to speculative stuff. Theater in particular, but then also film and TV, because of editing, because you can do so much with color, with just different filmmaking techniques and stuff. You can really invoke speculative elements without a lot of work, because the audience is already primed to accept whatever's on screen or on stage. There's a suspension of disbelief that's already happening the minute they walk through the door and they sit down.

And so, because I'm really passionate about speculative theater in particular, I think it's just such an underappreciated form. And I truly believe in my heart of hearts that you do not need expensive sets, fancy stage magic, big objects or elaborate costumes. Often, the simplest setup is enough to transport me into your world. I think you can do that with not a lot of work.

Last night, actually, I went to see—last night or the night before, at the time of recording—I went to see Asian Pirate Musical. It's by Zhui Ning Chang, who is editor of khōréō. And because she's based in London, she's doing this musical, she's in fact been working on it for like five years, and it was a beautiful kind of time travel-y thing about history and colonialism and like, finding your own way and finding where you belong in the world, but through time and also pirates and also music. It was great. I had a really great time, and it really wasn't an elaborate kind of staging, it was more a concert presentation of the songs, rather than a full version of what the play will be at some point. And we were all there. We were there on the ship. We were there in space. We were there in the various time periods. I thought it worked so well with so little in terms of sets and things. Like the costumes were very evocative, but simple, like nothing crazy. And it just really made me think of just how easy that can be for these art forms.

So you've made some films, certainly. Tell me a little bit about the struggle of filmmaking. Cause I know it's a lot.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: My first one was also related to ghosts. It was a musical dramedy. I was inspired by the pandemic: my late grandfather passed away, but we couldn't go back because the borders were closed. And so I was like, what if instead the ghosts of the ancestors spirits came and possessed the parents? And then we could have this farewell sing-off kind of thing together. It was part of this program in Toronto, Reel Asian Film Festival, where they had this really great program where people who maybe hadn't the opportunity to make films before, could in the span of a summer, which is very ambitious and very doable, make a short film. And so I pitched the idea and they're like, yeah, cool. And I was like, yeah, cool.

And then, I think I won't ever make a musical dramedy as my first short film ever again, because I had taken no film courses in the past. It was in Vancouver where I knew almost nobody, not even in the film industry, like nobody in any creative industry at that point. Getting the whole team together was like a matter of putting Facebook calls and managing a huge group of people. There were around 20 plus people on set, including actors and everyone else. After I finished writing the script, it wasn't a matter of just the script; it was like, shooting, and trying to figure out what that looks like, and then in post, editing, figuring out what we have, and what is different from the script, and how we can make that into a final product. And so I feel like every stage was another way of art making, of recreating the original idea. For that film, I feel if I could do it again, I might have done a bit more with the visual elements, because I focused a lot on the story and the music and what they were saying, but not so much on the visual elements.

The second short film I made was a video poem actually, and it was about the Chinese classical garden in Vancouver, Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden. It was based on this contest that Fiona Lam, Vancouver City Poet Laureate, was organizing at that time. And it was like, 'go out there and find some historical ecological places, and write poems about them'. And then based on the shortlisted poems, can you make a video poem? And I was like, okay, sure. I've done one short film, I can do another one.

And this one was much more scaled back. This one was much like, me and three other friends. I was like, I can't do the 20 plus people again. I think I can't do that. So then we just filmed it and then I edited it and added music to it. But yeah, it was definitely much more scaled back, but every film is so intense.

That's why I feel like I really can't ever do film full time. Cause I feel like it's just like a 9am to 7am job, there's a constant grind. It's always going to be like a push-push kind of feeling. And I think there's some new places that are trying to like, be more mindful of that, and like a nine to five job, but definitely those are harder to find.

And maybe the standard is more like, just got to push through it. I was like well, I kind of want to be able to enjoy my life in other ways. The reason I started making short films is because in part, I wanted to actually direct my feature film in the future, which I wrote the script for, and I was like, I need to get experience directing and explore that aspect.

And the last short film I've made was about an older Vancouver queer drag artist and we just did like a documentary style, but yeah, I think definitely it's a whole intensive process. Once you start, it's just a constant, you're just throwing money at it. It was really cool and really fun, of course, it's just super intense, and I really enjoyed the process. I think I would probably make another short film in the future, but not right now. It's like a different child. A child who needs a lot of work in a short period of time, short burst of time. And you need to be prepared for that.

Kat Kourbeti: The difficult thing about filmmaking, whether it's part of the industry, so to speak, or if you're just doing it yourself, is you don't realize until you're in it just how much work it can take to get something on camera the way you want it, to set it up so that it's easy. The locations, the equipment, the this, the that. I completely understand not really wanting to dive into another film quite yet. The good thing about them is that it is collaborative.

And aside from the film things and TV and theater scripts and all that, you also compose music, which I'm incredibly jealous of as a skill and as a way of thinking. I know that you have a special relationship with music, in a similar way that I do, that music can really drive the stuff that you write as well, which is super cool.

But tell me a bit about that relationship with music, and with writing, composing music.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think for me, I don't know why, it's like all the sounds of words relate to music, and texture/emotional qualities. And so I think that's a return to that for my music, like a return to that kind of like, what is it I'm trying to really explore in this piece of art?

For instance, the video poem, I composed music for that. It was on Logic Pro, and I used the Guzheng kind of music instrumentation input. And so it was a lot of fun, because I got to explore that element. I feel like I'm a little bit of a perfectionist sometimes. I tend to be the only person to care of everything.

Like with film, it's impossible. You can't be the only person to take care of everything, and the collaborative aspect is actually really enjoyable for that reason. But with the music, I get so caught up in it sometimes by accident that I'm focusing on it so much that I'm listening so hard. I'm like, 'Oh, I don't like that version or that moment'. And then I go back in and try to change it. So it gets a little bit stressful honestly for me sometimes, because I'm so picky. But I like the overall feeling of spontaneity, of the overflow of emotions in that moment, just composing, I think it depends on the kind of piece I'm composing but sometimes I'm just playing around with the music and the emotions, and just trying to imagine what kind of emotion, or a scene I'm trying to depict with the music, and then trying to fit that in, or play according to that emotion with the chords and notes and everything else. Yeah, I think that's the vibe.

I've been trying to compose a song for my partner for the past... four years? It's because I keep changing the vibe. 'Oh, it should be happy' and it's like 'oh, no, it should be like more know, mellow'. Yeah, and complex. So I have different versions of it and it's never done, and I feel like I finally have the version, I'm just going to—cause at this point, he's like, 'um, so where's the music video?'

Kat Kourbeti: I think that kind of reflects relationships, how things change and are always in flux, and there's always different feelings and different sort of things that come into it. And I think that's interesting how that is reflected in your process.

What sort of instruments do you tend to use for your compositions? Is it like purely piano, or do you veer with kind of more synth-y things? What's your kind of sound that you go for?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I think that might depend on the piece, but so far I've been using the keyboard into Logic Pro and working instrumentation there. But I also play the violin, a bit of guitar and I used to sing opera. So I think it goes back and forth between that. Actually, I think my style is more weirdly like, Chinese pop / musical theater / a bit of jazz.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay!

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: And I think, because sounds really impact me and everything, I don't tend to write a lot of, I don't know, extremely loud and angry. It's more like, sad and emotional, even if I'm angry.

So I'm partly working on this musical. I don't know exactly what the whole storyline is yet, but it's about neurodivergence and surviving in a world that's very chaotic and trying to filter that through.

For me, I love singing in musicals. So when I write music about neurodivergence, or how I experience neurodivergence, I think I tend to almost immediately go into that field somehow, even if I'm trying to write just one song. It's like when I'm writing a poem or when talking about 'creating the children', giving birth, quote unquote, to the children. It's like, if the children want this, like they wanna be a musical, then you can't make them be a song. They have to be a musical. So now it's a musical. So yeah. That's just how it is.

Kat Kourbeti: I like music for helping me kind of filter my thoughts, in a way, if that makes sense. Because I'm also neurodivergent and the chaos in my brain sometimes just needs a channel. And so that's my kind of interpretation of my relationship to music, is I think that it helps me focus the various things into one train of thought that can be followed.

And so, I think it's very interesting how you're using that to reflect your neurodivergent experience through your composition. I'll be very interested to hear that when you choose to release it in whatever form, whatever shape it ends up taking. Yeah, like a little neurodivergent musical. Hopefully with some kind of speculative element, maybe ghosts, knowing you?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Oh, I think definitely. I think I'm already incorporating witches and, yeah, probably we'll have ghosts.

Kat Kourbeti: Great. On brand.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yes. I think we talked about it in the (Worldcon) panel as well, how music influences the way we write a little bit.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's my other podcast that I'm launching soon at the time of recording. So at some point I would love to chat to you on that one more specifically, about the role of music in your writing. But, yeah, that's all just so wonderfully interconnected, your music, your scripts, your poetry, like there's a through line in everything about the diaspora experience, and your various life experiences, and the emotions that you want to convey.

I just love like, multi talented artists who just try all the things. As much as doing the one thing is fine and admirable, and I wish I knew how to do that.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Me too. I honestly I wish I knew how to do that too.

Kat Kourbeti: Wish I could specialize. That's not really my wheelhouse. I do all the things. And so just, yeah, it's wonderful. I will say we're going to link the playlist that we made in our anime panel in the show notes.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yes!

Kat Kourbeti: Cause we made this for the people who attended the panel and then just kept adding things.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: And so it's this four hour monster at the moment, and I'm sure it's going to grow longer.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: It might be five hours soon, I might add a few more.

Kat Kourbeti: Just add things, honestly. It's all the anime bangers that we like, and soundtracks, and openings and endings, and things that kind of speak to us. We spent about an hour just really going at it with Avery Delaney, and with Dakkar as well, who's a anime fan from Italy. Yeah, just a great conversation.

Outside of all of your creative work, you also edited quite a bit for Augur magazine, which is an SFF publication in Canada. Do you want to tell me a little bit about your editing process and your experience working at Augur?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah, I had a really wonderful time. I'm still part of the team. I'm like trying to figure out, I might help with like programming or some other aspects, but I think the editing aspect of it, I, because I edited so much for, at one point in undergrad, I was editing like 13 journals, like not at once, but it was like, academic and then creative, and then I was at Prism International and prose editing for them. And it was a really intense process, like of curation and editing. And I just, I think I need a little bit of a break, honestly, from editing, but I really do enjoy the process of editing and yeah, they're (Augur) an amazing group of people and Kerry, the co-founder, they're stepping back a little bit from that, but they're super cool.

I think the whole experience was really great because it was a lot of training from the ground up on how to edit. And so I think from that experience, I really got to understand how that process is like, and how to talk to authors and like stylistic, substantive, the whole process. I feel like it's because of Augur that I managed to edit for Prism International, which is UBC's creative writing journal. I just think it was a really great experience. They're doing such amazing work, honestly. The amount of intensity and care put into the journal and the pieces are just really amazing, inspiring. And yeah, just editing and then meeting the authors in different parts, and I'm like, 'Oh, I edited your piece!' and it's like, getting to know them, it's really nice to have that element as well. And yeah the conferences—they've been doing AugurCon. They did it online the first year, I think, and then in person, and it was really cool just to have that kind of energy.

And we went to World Fantasy recently. Some of us went to World Fantasy together, and it was just a joy because we rented out a Airbnb, and we just called it Augur House. We just like, hung out and had a night where we watched The Covenant, like the old one, like 'that's so bad is funny' one. Yeah. That was a really fun time.

Kat Kourbeti: Was it fiction you edited?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Oh yes, fiction, yes. Sorry, I forgot to mention that, yeah. I did fiction pieces.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm glad that it was a nice experience. I've only ever, you know, experienced the Augur everything online, I subscribed at one point, and I did come to at least two AugurCons, the virtual ones.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yay!

Kat Kourbeti: I really like what you guys do with, first of all, centering the Canadian experience, no matter what perspective that comes from, because it's all quite valid, but then also the approach to the global submissions, because you are open to stories from everybody, but the real care that I think you guys take with selecting and with nurturing.

What was your editing style, as an editor working on these pieces, like how involved were you?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yeah, I think it depended on which role you were in for sure. I would say I was quite involved with the process. We would have the pitch meetings, and then we'd choose which pieces we wanna edit. And then we would send out emails to the author, asking if they want an intro meeting, asking if they have any questions, and then we would go through, depending on what the piece needed, maybe a substantive round, and then a stylistic round, and then line edits, and then copy edits at the very end, and making sure we had the content warnings they needed or wanted, and then we would just send that off to where they would do the typesetting and everything else.

When I first started, I was kind of like an assistant, so I was not really sending the main emails, not really putting comments into the documents, not necessarily interacting directly with the authors. And then later on I was directly talking to the authors, and I think the main thing I really understood from all the experiences I've done, as a writer myself, I understand like how vulnerable it is to be edited.

Having to phrase in a way, if there's something that you're curious about like, 'Oh, I wonder about this. I'm curious about this'. And so like, balancing that and then also later learning - I would always ask the authors in the beginning 'how much edits do you want?', because usually it's not like you need like a ton of edits anyways, but if you would want your piece to be deeply edited versus lightly - because it's their piece. Whenever I edit, it's like helping them explore their vision of the piece. I'm not trying to like, fight them. We're trying to work together, like on a movie, it's like we're director and producer, trying to make this thing happen. That's something I started asking, 'how deeply do you want to edit it?'

And so some people are like, 'we want all the edits'. And people were like, 'not so much'. So then I would consider that when going through the piece, cause we're working together and I'm trying to help them polish it for publication. It's not about trying to fit any kind of vision of what I think it should be, it's about their vision of what it should be. And if their vision is that they don't want that many edits or they want it to be similar to what they have already now, then that should be fine. I think we should follow what they want.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I think it's the mark of any good magazine to really meet the author where they're at, and with what they're trying to do, and just try and find ways to make that shine more, whether that's intensive edits or, 'yeah, this is fine. Change this comma, please.'

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Yes, exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: I think it's a lot of what we do here as well, at Strange Horizons, we don't really often change very much at all. It's very much about finding, like you say, what the vision is that the author has for the story, what is it that they're trying to convey, and just making sure that we're helping them do that.

And I'm really glad that has led to more editing stuff for you. But I can also understand how it's a big, kind of involved process. And maybe you want to take a little breather at the moment. That's fair enough. I really hope that the novel comes along.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: Sooner rather than later!

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Some people are waiting for it. I'm like, oh my gosh!

Kat Kourbeti: We want to read it! Yes, please.

But yeah, thank you so much for spending your time with us and for sharing all of your art with us.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: No, thank you for just your wonderful questions. We were just like, we met at Worldcon on that panel specifically. So it's really serendipitous. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's a thing. SFF friendships. We connect over the things we geek about and it's really great.

Is there anything that you're working on right now that you'd like to promote?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I'm editing my thesis novel. It's about sisterhood, but like weird timelines and Chinese philosophy elements and very much - all fiction is auto fiction, but I feel like a lot of the things I'm grappling with, like, how to find order in a chaotic world when the outside world is so externally chaotic to me, and working through depression, and, like, the diaspora experience, and it's written in the form of letters to the past and present between the two sisters. I don't know if it's something I need to promote right now, because I'm still finishing the edits for it. I can't actually be like, go ahead and read it, because it's not published yet. Um, but that's something to look forward to, yes.

Kat Kourbeti: And where can we find you on social media?

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: I switched my handle a couple of years ago, but right now I'm @VivianLiCreates, on BlueSky and Instagram.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, lovely. So we'll find you there. Thank you so much for your time and we look forward to all your future endeavors.

Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li: Oh, thank you so much, Kat. It was a pleasure and honor to be here. Thank you.