Timber and Lua

Timber and La is an experimental collaboration between Lily Hong and Vi Khi No, blending self-translations across Vietlish, Vietnamese, and English to create a unique diasporic literary genre. Comprised of ten short stories, the collection explores a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales. These stories reflect themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering a dynamic, eccentric range of narratives: love stories woven through fragmented memories, a blend of folklore and fantasy, Vietnamese-American identities reimagined in a post-apocalyptic world, and an exploration of how meaning transforms in self-translation. Similar to Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, who translated their own work (from English to French and from Russian to English, respectively), Hong and No extend that makeshift "tradition" by hybridizing their translation to graft the genetic material of one language (English) and the genetic material of another language (Vietnamese) to produce a new literary diasporic genre. Timber and La coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (19752025), as a diasporic literary contribution and commemorative celebration.

Lily Hoàng is the author of nine books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Nonfiction Award finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). She is a professor of literature at UC San Diego, where she teaches in their MFA in Literary Arts. She lives in San Diego, California.

Vi Khi Nào is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, theatre, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations, most recently The Italy Letters (Melville House) and The Six Tones of Water, coauthored with Sun Yung Shin (Ricochet). Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nào received the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

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