Selected Writings
Fiction
TBLR Vol. 4: This Peculiar Radiant Landscape: The Climate Issue
Featuring new work by Elinam Agbo, Keyan Bowes, Omar El Akkad, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Amanda Kallis, Heidi Kaloustian, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Caroline Kim, Liu Daohang, Melissa Mogollon, Abbigail Rosewood, Francis Santana, Casey A. Williams, and Olga Zilberbourg. Photography by Nate Kauffman.
A Girl Is Grown Like a Poem Is Grown
A flash fiction piece explores the intriguing process by which a girl “becomes,” how she is simultaneously “made and unmade” by the experiences and influences which surround her.
Dead Jasmine
My mother worked to pay my nanny, who laundered, cooked, and put me to bed, but it was a male omniscience I prayed to, his masculine benediction I longed for.
Then when the house caught on fire and going back only meant standing on a bed of ash and wet grass, we began to transform every place we lived in into our childhood home.
Outside
The first time I saw them, more than a decade ago now, they were standing in a circle behind the sun’s shadow. Even from a distance, I could tell they would tower over me, their chins several inches above my head, a mathematical difference in perspective. In their fists, beer, a baseball, throw darts, something crumbling.
Hour-Glass
I remember being born, the deep red rush, the slippery vessel, the convulsion of tears and sweat, of not-wanting, then suddenly—the light. I don’t remember my mother. In bringing me to life, she’d retracted inside her body, an inversed dahlia, the multiple petals folding into itself.
Nonfiction
A Fortune-Teller Saw My Future in My Eyebrows
As a Vietnamese immigrant, I found understanding in the horoscope readers of my family and the Asian diaspora.
Had One Thing Changed
The joy of love is often coupled with the fear of loss. Here, novelist Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood recalls how anxiety before her wedding returned her to the impermanence of life, to its multiple pathways and infinite realities, as explored in her new book, The Constellations of Eve.
There Is Grace in Patience: On the Writing Lessons of Tarot
Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood Considers Trust, Discovery, and Dreaming While Awake
I Moved to America for a Better Life. Here's Why I'm Leaving
For the first time in more than 20 years, I will no longer have to explain where I’m from — nobody will ask.
The City Writer Versus the Country Writer
Choosing one life means missing out on another; it is not possible to be everywhere all at once, to do everything, to be everyone.
I Thought I Hated Texting, but I Was Just Doing It Wrong
As a millennial who preferred phone calls and IRL convos, I thought texting was the worst. Then I discovered the art of long-form text messages.
Sex in trees
Sex is assumed to be an intensely private experience, but like much else, we experience one thing in relation to another. In that sense, sex is advertisement, sex is food, sex is car insurance, and mothers in Alo Yoga uniforms; sex is expensive baby strollers, and Seamless, a rat coming out of a garbage bag with a chicken bone in its mouth. Sex is subliminal. In the city, sex is ambitious, overwhelmingly so. How many times must we do it daily? Sex is competition. Sex is public.
Oh Reader Issue 004
Oh Reader is a magazine about reading, for and by readers. It looks deep into the art of reading—why we do it, how it affects us, who we are when we read, and how we’re all connected through words.
Cooking Thịt Kho, and Remembering What it Means to Be Vietnamese
The Debt of Love
“I learned to love my father through the curvature of his absence,...as a ghost, an invention, a hearsay.”
Publishing Your Novel
Won’t
Cure You
After the exhilaration of publication dissolved, I still had myself to face.
7 Books about What Happens when Your Identity Falls Apart
Abbigail N. Rosewood, author of "If I Had Two Lives," recommends fiction from around the world about psychic splits
Poetry
Beggars
Would That
By She Who Has No Master(s)
Collaborations
TOC Community Cookbook
In the spirit of the classic community cookbooks assembled by churches, PTAs, families, and charities, the Tables of Contents Community Cookbook is a collection of personal recipes and brief reflections on food from 36 contemporary poets, essayists and fiction writers.
“She Who Has No Master(s): Would That”
This poetry-art exhibit (viewable online) is taking place at the Eccles Gallery at Salt Lake City Community College from October 8-November 6.
Writing on the Wall
Disappeared Booksellers and Free Expression in Hong Kong
Conversations
This Weightless World: A Conversation with Adam Soto
The Refugee as a Cosmopolitan Figure: Eric Nguyen Interviewed by Abbigail N. Rosewood
A Joyous Experience: An Tôn Thất In Conversation with Abbigail N. Rosewood
Life is as Creative as You Make It: A Conversation with Mark Chu
A discussion on friendship, using scientific research in art, and Mark’s upcoming show.
Interview with Vietnamese Journalist and Human Rights Lawyer Trinh Huu Long
In this interview, Trinh explains the danger that Vietnamese bloggers face when they discuss political issues, as well as the state of free expression in the country and his honest views as to how Vietnamese activism is shaped by cultural constraints.
Coming soon:
A conversation between Abbigail and Violet Kupersmith, author of The Frangipani Hotel will be featured in the forthcoming book project: Diaspora in Dialogue: Vietnamese Writers Speak Aloud among 16 dialogues between writers from Germany, Israel, France, the United States, Indonesia, and Australia, edited by Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, and Lan Duong.