Interview with Angela Liu
by Linlang Zhao
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in
NYC and Tokyo. She is a three-time Nebula Award and
2025 Astounding Award Finalist. Her work has also
been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and
Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed
reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new
narrative platforms. Her stories and poems are
published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons,
Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. Check
out more of her work at www.liu-angela.com or find her
on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky
@angelaliu.bsky.social
.
Orion’s Belt: For your work “Brainstem Disco,” the narrator repeatedly attempts to revise the past (through contemplation or revisiting it). Was this designed to explore things such as human desire to transform love (something intangible and, perhaps, short-lived) into something preservable?
Angela Liu: I like exploring the idea of changing things that seem unchangeable. Memory itself is this kind of intangible thing that shapes us. When you have a relationship with somebody, those memories (in theory!) can no longer be changed. It happened; that's what it is. But in speculative fiction, you can change the rules! In “Brainstem Disco, 2191,” the main character keeps reliving their own memories, but with a different face and different personality each time. They’re confident that if they’d looked different, acted differently, been someone better, smarter, they could have saved the person they loved. Yet the outcome is always the same. Maybe this is just my own obsession with what-ifs, but I wanted to tell a story that would let readers see how much joy is lost from regretting what’s already past. That there’s beauty in remembering the things we’ve lost too.
Orion’s Belt: Do you seek to preserve connections between people and communities in your writing?
Angela Liu: I don't think I'm actively trying to preserve connections, but I do think I like exploring why people connect and how they stay connected. In the elevator scene in “Brainstem Disco, 2191” two characters have a brief conversation about dance music that stays with the main character for the rest of their life. I often think about those kind of fleeting conversations we have with people, maybe on a train, school orientation line, while sheltering under the same awning during the rain, and how you might never see that person again, how you might not even remember their name or face, but that tiny moment of time you shared with them can stay with you for decades.
Orion’s Belt: Between the final product and the initial draft, how do you make the editing happen smoothly? How do you know which part to revise or which part to edit?
Angela Liu: I'm probably the worst person to ask because I overedit everything. My drafts always end up too long. The short story I'm writing now started at around 2,000 words and has now ballooned to about 20,000 words. And it's still not finished. I also tend not to write linearly so I often end up with a hodgepodge of different, disjointed scenes. When I get really stuck with edits, I usually try to come up with an ending sentence I like and then start editing backwards from that.
Orion’s Belt: Is that also how you treat poetry? Do you approach fiction and poetry from different angles?
Angela Liu: I approach poetry and fiction very differently. For poetry, I mostly focus on conveying a specific feeling or image. It doesn’t need to make immediate sense, but it needs to make readers feel something. If I get an idea for a new poem, I need to write the first draft right away because if I don’t finish it while the image or emotion that inspired it is fresh, I’ll probably never finish it. That rough first draft will usually take less than twenty minutes, and then I’ll go back and edit extensively later. If I leave it and try to write it the next day or even a few hours later, the voice is gone, no matter how much I chase it.
For fiction, I usually start with an idea for a journey I want to take and how to make that journey interesting for readers too. A mystery on an island. Rediscovering family through food-focused time travel. It can’t just be a series of images or simply a feeling. Sometimes I’ll start writing a poem, but end up turning it into a story because I start seeing the narrative arc (or vice versa, when a story feels too much like vibes only). “Brainstem Disco, 2191” actually started off as a poem, while my poem, “3,000 Year Love Confession” started off as a flash story.
Orion’s Belt: Are there any underlying extensibilities or connections between these two forms from your perspective?
Angela Liu: There’s something really liberating about simply playing with language—messing around with the rhythm, word choices, line breaks, and even purposeful ambiguity. I do it sometimes with fiction, but I think that’s one of my favorite parts of writing (and reading) poetry. Sometimes it’s just thinking about: What word will delight people in this specific sentence? What line break will shock or move someone to tears? How can I work in a concept that only exists in a different language? I love rediscovering the fun and power of language itself. To me, that’s the closest thing to powerful magic. How a single word, planned just the right way, can completely change a reader’s perspective.
Orion’s Belt: Are there any pieces that make you feel like you are taking a risk, or are the ones that you hope more people will read? We’d love to shout it out here!
Angela Liu: I think two recent stories I’d like to shout out are “The Island of Sea Turtles and Blood” in Apex Magazine and “What We Mean When We Talk About The Hole In The Bathroom” in Uncanny Magazine. Both are about beautiful liminal spaces, and the different ways we hide ourselves from the people we love. I love horror stories that aren’t about the obvious monster in the story. A shorter, recent piece that started off as a poem and ended up as a flash story is “Spinal Tap” in The Commuter. I’d love for more readers to check these out!
Orion’s Belt: Thank you!
