The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) issued a notice on December 29 to state medical-licensed marijuana dispensaries that stated curbside pickup for medical patients would stop at the start of 2023. But just five days later, the department extended the variance through January 31.

In the December notice to dispensaries, the IDFPR wrote “there will be no further extensions of this variance.” 

Dina Rollman, senior vice president of government affairs at Green Thumb Industries, was unsure about why the variance needed to end in the first place.

“We have taken steps to try to understand what the purported reason was for ending curbside and we have been unable to discern any basis for it whatsoever,” she said.

Green Thumb Industries operates 77 dispensaries across the country under the brand name Rise, ten of which are in Illinois, the maximum allowed by state law. Five of the Illinois dispensaries are dual-purpose facilities, meaning they sell cannabis for recreational and medical patients.

The variance instituted by the IDFPR, the regulatory arm of Illinois’s cannabis market, is centered around the security and recordkeeping subsection of the medical marijuana program law. The IDFPR did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’re not aware of any negative occurrences that would remotely justify taking away curbside,” Rollman said when asked if any security issues have arisen.

GTI is the only multi-state operator in Illinois that offers curbside or roll-thru at all of their Illinois dual-purpose dispensaries in Canton, Effingham, Joliet, Mundelein and Naperville.

“It’s really great for those who are immunocompromised or who have physical limitations,” Rollman said. “Especially during a midwest winter when you can also add weather conditions. It’s really a nice offering to be able to let patients stay in their car and transact their business.

“Not only has COVID been an ongoing concern for our patients but there are other respiratory ailments that are making their rounds,” Rollman said. According to the Illinois Wastewater Surveillance System, which monitors levels of disease-causing pathogens in sewer systems, COVID-19 cases have been on the rise since late December.

Other major multi-state operators in Illinois such as Cresco Labs and PharmaCann, which operate Sunnyside and Verilife respectively, do not offer curbside pickup at any of their dual-purpose dispensaries.

While the pause on canceling curbside pickup was welcomed by medical marijuana patients, many the Reader spoke to say it should be extended indefinitely.

“I feel like they don’t understand the effect of how that’s going to compromise some patients’ ability to get their medication and care that they need,” said Emily Mosher, a medical patient since June 2020 and former employee at dual-purpose dispensary Hatch in Addison.

“It just didn’t make any sense to me,” said Michael Viles, 67, who has been a medical card holder since October 2019. “I’ve got a wife at home; she’s got [respiratory] complications. I can’t afford to drag any germs home with me, and I try to do every precaution I can.”

Since Governor J.B. Pritzker lifted the statewide mask mandate on February 28, 2022, masking has dropped off inside businesses all over the city, dispensaries included.

“I guarantee you when you go in the dispensaries, nobody’s wearing masks anymore, and some of them I go into are small dispensaries and it’s pretty crowded, so I didn’t like it,” Viles said.

There is a real need for options, especially for people living with disabilities as some medical patients are, said Laura Saltzman, transportation policy analyst at Access Living, a civil rights group dedicated to helping people living with disability.

“Transportation is already difficult and complicated for people with disabilities, making things as easy as possible is good. Limiting the complications is so necessary,” Saltzman said. “COVID is permanent, this variance built around COVID should be permanent.”

Ryan Sykes, a medical consultation advisor at dual-purpose dispensary NuEra in East Peoria, said that curbside is one of the positive changes that were instituted when COVID forced the state to reconsider procedures. The application process for a medical cannabis card was digitized, and the state switched to digital proof instead of printed cards. Also, medical patients were no longer required to shop at a single dispensary.

Curbside pickup is “beneficial for all parties involved. Just along the lines of the same with the other COVID improvements,” Sykes said. “It really is just a quality-of-life improvement for people that are already marginalized and disadvantaged in ways that most other people don’t have to deal with.”In early December, while touring the first social equity dispensary in Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker said he was open to the idea of allowing dispensaries to deliver cannabis to people who make online orders. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment about curbside pickup.

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On January 5, workers at Howard Brown Health Center ended a three-day strike that was spurred by the sudden layoffs of more than five dozen employees at the organization’s clinics. The workers are vowing to continue to fight to reinstate their jobs and have lingering concerns about the organization’s finances and leadership.

The crisis began in November 2021, when workers learned of impending layoffs that were initially scheduled to happen on January 3rd. But several workers who spoke to the Reader say Howard Brown’s management enacted the layoffs without warning four early, on December 30th.

D’Eva Longoria didn’t know that her last day working at Howard Brown would end so abruptly. She was aware she was among the 60 people Howard Brown Health Clinic planned to lay off, but was surprised when her computer screen went blank while she was in the middle of assisting a patient during her last shift. Without warning, Longoria says, everyone being laid off lost access to their work emails, work phones, and the platform the organization uses to speak with patients. Longoria was letting a patient know when they’re next PrEP appointment was, who she isn’t sure will be able to make it now. “I have no way of reaching out to that person. I don’t know their number,” she said. 

Longoria has been a PrEP Community Engagement Specialist at Howard Brown since March 2019. She technically worked out of the Sheridan clinic, but her real office hours were spent out in the community, passing out condoms at 71st and Pulaski, doing outreach at La Cueva in Little Village, and talking to queer and trans immigrants newly arrived about how to get queer and trans affirming health care. 

Longoria says that management had told those being laid off nothing about what to expect or what to tell their patients. She and the others only just learned they were getting laid off less than a month before. She hopes that people who rely on her for the outreach and programming she does see the video she posted in Spanish on her social media. 

Protesters delivered a list of demands to CEO David Munar’s home in December. Jennifer Bamberg

Munar says that the new clinic, located on Halsted and Cornelia, will help them generate more visits, which means more non-340B revenue, and keep them financially afloat. According to the union, Howard Brown Health said in an email to employees that nearly half of their patients are served by two out of the five clinics on the north side and the extra space is direly needed.

The union says that the heavy use on the north side is due to people being willing to travel across the city for better resources. 

According to Flowers, the clinics on the south side have had consistent issues with utilities, sanitation and safety. Throughout the four years she worked at the 63rd Street Clinic, there have been issues with “brown water coming out of the faucet, no air in the summer, no heat in the winter. Sometimes there’s rodent issues . . . . The doors don’t work half the time. Even our emergency buttons, if there’s an emergency in the clinic, they don’t work half the time.” 

She said that the maintenance team does the best they can, but “there’s only so much you can do.” She says the conditions are not safe for the workers or the patients. 

Because of the staff cuts, the south side clinics are now completely without any long-term councilors and the substance use group Recovering with Pride has been slashed, according to the union.

Munar says that several programs will be combined and case managers will receive additional training in order to continue to provide behavioral health services on the south  side.

Lindsay Martin, a therapist at the Halsted clinic and a bargaining committee member who was laid off, said that this will harm patients. “[Munar] doesn’t know that because he’s not a health care worker. He’s a businessman, and it’s about business for him. And that’s not how healthcare works.”

The clinic has promised to build a new health care center in Bronzeville by 2024, but a representative said in a written statement to the Reader that “Howard Brown will need to stabilize its finances before any further growth plans advance” and that “discussions are in preliminary stages” regarding the south side clinic.

When Gilead announced they were ending the era of lush reimbursements back in April of 2021, advocates worried that it would spell utter doom for HIV care and prevention programs and the patients who depend on them. 

“It’s a reminder . . . that our country needs more sustainable ways to support public health and our communities,” wrote a representative from CrescentCare, a LGBTQ+ centered health clinic in New Orleans. It was founded in 1983 in response to the HIV epidemic, and like Howard Brown, focuses on prevention and making PrEP accessible to those who need it the most.

But unlike Howard Brown, CrescentCare hasn’t had a significant dependence on Gilead’s Advancing Access patient assistance program, and only 28 percent of their budget comes from 340B, as opposed to the approximately 81 percent from Howard Brown from their last fiscal year ending in June 2022. 

“Howard Brown . . . has an outsized dependence on this funding source,” Munar said. 

Munar took the helm at Howard Brown in 2014, secured FQHC status for the clinic in 2015, and started making the clinic more money thereafter. His salary in 2020 was $308,435, part of which was a $20,000 bonus, according to the most recent tax filings. That bonus totaled more than the 6 percent pay cut he and others in executive leadership took to contribute to the clinic’s recent belt tightening. Several past and current staff members are calling for Munar’s resignation. 

“It’s very evident that this problem could have been prevented,” said Julia Bartmes, executive director of the Illinois Nurses Association. “And it’s also evident that these layoffs don’t need to happen . . . . Our members who were laid off are paying the price for [Munar’s] and the executive leadership team’s mismanagement. We’d like to see him gone.”

She said that the union doesn’t have a right to bargain over non-bargaining unit member’s employment, so it’s not something they can demand in the context of bargaining. 

“But I think that the organization would be better off with someone else at the helm,” Bartmes said.

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Back in days of yore, when Ludlow Liquors first swung its doors open in Avondale, the work of its kitchen and first chef was described as a “permanent food installation.” In the years since, there’s been nothing permanent about it, as it has been home to an ever-shifting but always interesting cast of weird and wonderful kitchen warriors: Nick Jirasek and his Beefy Boys and crab “dragoon”; Mickey Neely and his Sicilian pies and Wee B’s-style burgers; “Asian stoner food” power couple SuperHai—and a whole rogues’ gallery of pop-up chefs.

This January 23 another concept settles in on the corner of California and Wellington when Monday Night Foodball launches a new 2023 season. Sure, I’m sad that the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up is leaving its ancestral home at the Kedzie Inn, but Ludlow already feels comfortable. And not much is changing except the coordinates: you can still read about each chef and their menus every week right here, and access the earliest menu drops by following each chef, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram.

We’ve assembled a stellar lineup, if I may say so myself, with old and new faces alike, from separate but equally sorcerous Texas-style barbecue specialists like Mike Shaker of Shaker Barbecue and Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ to Michelin-grade smokers Tom Rogers and Adam McFarland of Better Boy.

We have Jamaican food from Tameisha Brown of Be Irie Restaurant, fresh off her pop-up debut at Honey Butter Fried Chicken; crunchwrap king Khaled Simon of Taco Sublime; and a cheese party from Reader People issue star Alisha Norris Jones of Immortal Milk.

Palita Sriratana of Pink Salt is coming back hot from her recent Thailand travels; Jessica Walks First of Ketapanen Kitchen headlines with Native, Tribal, and foraged foods; MNF veterans Thattu preview their up-and-coming Keralan street food brick-and-mortar; and Foodball OGsJoey Pham (fka Flavor Supreme) and Mike “Ramen Lord” Satinover are joining forces with Cat Pham (aka @scratchsniffpurr) for a post-Super Bowl/pre-Valentine’s wonton soup and egg roll night.

But first it’s all kicking off with Marko and Nemanja Milunovic, whose marvelous Balkan eats and drinks launched the 2022 season. More on that here.

That ain’t all. There are other big Foodball doings in store in 2023, so put your fat pants on and strap in.

Read More

Back in days of yore, when Ludlow Liquors first swung its doors open in Avondale, the work of its kitchen and first chef was described as a “permanent food installation.” In the years since, there’s been nothing permanent about it, as it has been home to an ever-shifting but always interesting cast of weird and wonderful kitchen warriors: Nick Jirasek and his Beefy Boys and crab “dragoon”; Mickey Neely and his Sicilian pies and Wee B’s-style burgers; “Asian stoner food” power couple SuperHai—and a whole rogues’ gallery of pop-up chefs.

This January 23 another concept settles in on the corner of California and Wellington when Monday Night Foodball launches a new 2023 season. Sure, I’m sad that the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up is leaving its ancestral home at the Kedzie Inn, but Ludlow already feels comfortable. And not much is changing except the coordinates: you can still read about each chef and their menus every week right here, and access the earliest menu drops by following each chef, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram.

We’ve assembled a stellar lineup, if I may say so myself, with old and new faces alike, from separate but equally sorcerous Texas-style barbecue specialists like Mike Shaker of Shaker Barbecue and Joe Yim of Knox Ave BBQ to Michelin-grade smokers Tom Rogers and Adam McFarland of Better Boy.

We have Jamaican food from Tameisha Brown of Be Irie Restaurant, fresh off her pop-up debut at Honey Butter Fried Chicken; crunchwrap king Khaled Simon of Taco Sublime; and a cheese party from Reader People issue star Alisha Norris Jones of Immortal Milk.

Palita Sriratana of Pink Salt is coming back hot from her recent Thailand travels; Jessica Walks First of Ketapanen Kitchen headlines with Native, Tribal, and foraged foods; MNF veterans Thattu preview their up-and-coming Keralan street food brick-and-mortar; and Foodball OGsJoey Pham (fka Flavor Supreme) and Mike “Ramen Lord” Satinover are joining forces with Cat Pham (aka @scratchsniffpurr) for a post-Super Bowl/pre-Valentine’s wonton soup and egg roll night.

But first it’s all kicking off with Marko and Nemanja Milunovic, whose marvelous Balkan eats and drinks launched the 2022 season. More on that here.

That ain’t all. There are other big Foodball doings in store in 2023, so put your fat pants on and strap in.

Read More

I don’t usually get ensnared by a book. But Ling Ma’s short story collection, Bliss Montage, was different. I started reading it Thanksgiving morning and literally could not stop. There was something urgent in Ma’s writing, something that demanded full attention. It might be her distinctive voice—wry, witty, relatable. Or her sentences—carefully crafted, but not too carefully. Or the fact that there is always something savage and dark behind her polished prose.

Ling Ma’s stories are about people who don’t fit in, who don’t feel at home, even in their own skin. They don’t know who they are or what they want. And when they dare to do something decisive, things inevitably go wrong. 

In one story, “Oranges,” the narrator, the survivor of an abusive relationship, becomes obsessed with trying to warn her ex’s current girlfriend about him. No surprise, things do not go well. In Ma’s world, no good deed goes unpunished. 

In a Kirkus interview, the author said she often works in the horror genre. As in the horror of Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a gigantic beetle. In Ma’s story, “Tomorrow,” a pregnant woman finds that she must live with her unborn child’s forearm protruding penis-like from her vagina. Very Kafkaesque, this weird mix of horror and humor. Ma calls Kafka her ”bread and butter.”

Bliss Montage by Ling MaFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, hardcover, 240 pp., $26, us.macmillan.com

Similarly, in “Yeti Lovemaking,” the narrator recounts a fling with an abominable snowman, an experience that sounds increasingly horrific the more she reveals about it. She writes, “Making love to a Yeti is difficult and painful at first but easy once you’ve done it more than thirty times. . . . the skin toughens, capillaries become less prone to breakage. Contusions heal by morning—you don’t even see them. Certain fluids stop secreting altogether.” Horrifying. And funny.

“For the very dark topics, you have to be funny,” Ma tells me.

After reading Bliss Montage (which is a finalist for the Story Prize) twice, I had to read Severance. Severance put Ma on the map, winning her the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and earning her a place on lots of best books lists. It is a fascinating, odd, hybrid novel; part comic office fiction, part post-apocalyptic portrait of America. Imagine the world-weary comedy of Parks and Recreation with scenes reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist dystopias. In a Paris Review interview, Ma says she watched a lot of The Walking Dead while writing it, and also read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

The tone of Severance is similar to Bliss Montage. And so are the issues the characters face. In Severance, the hero, a disaffected New Yorker named Candace Chen, first drifts through life in Manhattan, working at a publishing job she kind of hates, and then, after the country is paralyzed by a brain-destroying pandemic that zombifies its victims, joins a group of drifters tripping across the country looking for . . . what? They’re not sure. 

Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China; her parents took her to America when she was six. She grew up in Utah, Kansas, and Nebraska, attended the University of Chicago and Cornell, worked at various jobs in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, and seems to have never felt entirely at home anywhere. China is not home either. “I’m not very fluent in Mandarin,” she tells me, “I can speak conversational Chinese.”

Ma spent her childhood reading. “My parents were both so busy and doing other things. I mostly had to entertain myself. Going to the library was really the highlight of my week.”

Ma also loved movies. Her stories abound in references to them: Torn Curtain, L’avventura, Ghost World. One story in Bliss Montage is about a woman who becomes a professor of cinema studies. The very title of the book is a term in film studies; coined by film scholar Jeanine Basinger, bliss montage refers to movie sequences where a series of pleasurable moments (a date, a birthday party, a trip) are edited together, usually with sound behind it.

“I worked at the library,” she explains. “I would just get loads of movies and watch them through the weekend. I got a hold of Ingmar Bergman. I watched a bunch of Hitchcock as a teenager. I’m a big fan of Hitchcock films. I really admire the way that he sets up many of his storytelling elements.”

“A lot of my cultural consumption as a kid and as a teen was about assimilation,” Ma admits, “trying to understand this culture that I had ended up in but had not personally chosen for myself. But I think I was also trying to demonstrate some kind of mastery of [American] culture.” This may explain why she packs her work with so many pop culture references (Liz Phair, Margaret Cho, red Solo cups, Judith Butler).

“[I was] trying to learn how to pass as American, trying to figure out how, not through what I was wearing, but through, I guess, my mental state, my frame of mind.” Ma pauses, not finishing the thought, then says, “Like, what is the American frame of mind?”

In a 2019 interview in the Chicago Tribune, she admitted she felt pressured, while an MFA candidate, to write a “traditional immigration novel.” This issue comes up in her story, “Peking Duck,” where a woman is criticized in a writing class for perpetuating Asian stereotypes. “I think that’s a particularly painful moment,” Ma sighs. “Perhaps the story does shepherd in some stereotypes, unconsciously or otherwise. But that’s, I think, just the burden of representation. One story, one narrative has to represent all this entire group of people. And that’s what a lot of non-white writers have to go through, or be subjected to, that burden of representation. I think it’s also why, with Severance, I resisted writing a traditional immigrant narrative. I didn’t want my first book to be an immigrant narrative.”

Still, the issue of identity is central to Ma’s work.

After high school, Ma went to the University of Chicago with the idea of perhaps becoming an archaeologist. “Dig things up, put things together, was my idea of an interesting way of spending my time.” That didn’t work out, and Ma tried anthropology and then economics. “I think I just ended up majoring in English because the Chicago winters are very long.” Ma quips, “You get depressed and all you can do is stay in the apartment and read Henry James.”

After college she worked at various publishing jobs. For a while she lived in Berkeley, California, and wrote for the East Bay Express. She attended a summer journalism fellowship at Northwestern’s Medill School, and wrote for the Chicago Reader. But Ma’s foray into journalism was short-lived. She lacked, in her words, “a journalist’s killer instinct.”

Instead, Ma found her home in fiction.  

“I think fiction is the space where you can explore things you would never do yourself in your own life,” she says. “[Fiction] is not about replicating reality. It’s actually about expanding experience. That’s really what you want to do, to go beyond experience.”

Read More

I don’t usually get ensnared by a book. But Ling Ma’s short story collection, Bliss Montage, was different. I started reading it Thanksgiving morning and literally could not stop. There was something urgent in Ma’s writing, something that demanded full attention. It might be her distinctive voice—wry, witty, relatable. Or her sentences—carefully crafted, but not too carefully. Or the fact that there is always something savage and dark behind her polished prose.

Ling Ma’s stories are about people who don’t fit in, who don’t feel at home, even in their own skin. They don’t know who they are or what they want. And when they dare to do something decisive, things inevitably go wrong. 

In one story, “Oranges,” the narrator, the survivor of an abusive relationship, becomes obsessed with trying to warn her ex’s current girlfriend about him. No surprise, things do not go well. In Ma’s world, no good deed goes unpunished. 

In a Kirkus interview, the author said she often works in the horror genre. As in the horror of Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a gigantic beetle. In Ma’s story, “Tomorrow,” a pregnant woman finds that she must live with her unborn child’s forearm protruding penis-like from her vagina. Very Kafkaesque, this weird mix of horror and humor. Ma calls Kafka her ”bread and butter.”

Bliss Montage by Ling MaFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, hardcover, 240 pp., $26, us.macmillan.com

Similarly, in “Yeti Lovemaking,” the narrator recounts a fling with an abominable snowman, an experience that sounds increasingly horrific the more she reveals about it. She writes, “Making love to a Yeti is difficult and painful at first but easy once you’ve done it more than thirty times. . . . the skin toughens, capillaries become less prone to breakage. Contusions heal by morning—you don’t even see them. Certain fluids stop secreting altogether.” Horrifying. And funny.

“For the very dark topics, you have to be funny,” Ma tells me.

After reading Bliss Montage (which is a finalist for the Story Prize) twice, I had to read Severance. Severance put Ma on the map, winning her the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and earning her a place on lots of best books lists. It is a fascinating, odd, hybrid novel; part comic office fiction, part post-apocalyptic portrait of America. Imagine the world-weary comedy of Parks and Recreation with scenes reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist dystopias. In a Paris Review interview, Ma says she watched a lot of The Walking Dead while writing it, and also read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

The tone of Severance is similar to Bliss Montage. And so are the issues the characters face. In Severance, the hero, a disaffected New Yorker named Candace Chen, first drifts through life in Manhattan, working at a publishing job she kind of hates, and then, after the country is paralyzed by a brain-destroying pandemic that zombifies its victims, joins a group of drifters tripping across the country looking for . . . what? They’re not sure. 

Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China; her parents took her to America when she was six. She grew up in Utah, Kansas, and Nebraska, attended the University of Chicago and Cornell, worked at various jobs in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, and seems to have never felt entirely at home anywhere. China is not home either. “I’m not very fluent in Mandarin,” she tells me, “I can speak conversational Chinese.”

Ma spent her childhood reading. “My parents were both so busy and doing other things. I mostly had to entertain myself. Going to the library was really the highlight of my week.”

Ma also loved movies. Her stories abound in references to them: Torn Curtain, L’avventura, Ghost World. One story in Bliss Montage is about a woman who becomes a professor of cinema studies. The very title of the book is a term in film studies; coined by film scholar Jeanine Basinger, bliss montage refers to movie sequences where a series of pleasurable moments (a date, a birthday party, a trip) are edited together, usually with sound behind it.

“I worked at the library,” she explains. “I would just get loads of movies and watch them through the weekend. I got a hold of Ingmar Bergman. I watched a bunch of Hitchcock as a teenager. I’m a big fan of Hitchcock films. I really admire the way that he sets up many of his storytelling elements.”

“A lot of my cultural consumption as a kid and as a teen was about assimilation,” Ma admits, “trying to understand this culture that I had ended up in but had not personally chosen for myself. But I think I was also trying to demonstrate some kind of mastery of [American] culture.” This may explain why she packs her work with so many pop culture references (Liz Phair, Margaret Cho, red Solo cups, Judith Butler).

“[I was] trying to learn how to pass as American, trying to figure out how, not through what I was wearing, but through, I guess, my mental state, my frame of mind.” Ma pauses, not finishing the thought, then says, “Like, what is the American frame of mind?”

In a 2019 interview in the Chicago Tribune, she admitted she felt pressured, while an MFA candidate, to write a “traditional immigration novel.” This issue comes up in her story, “Peking Duck,” where a woman is criticized in a writing class for perpetuating Asian stereotypes. “I think that’s a particularly painful moment,” Ma sighs. “Perhaps the story does shepherd in some stereotypes, unconsciously or otherwise. But that’s, I think, just the burden of representation. One story, one narrative has to represent all this entire group of people. And that’s what a lot of non-white writers have to go through, or be subjected to, that burden of representation. I think it’s also why, with Severance, I resisted writing a traditional immigrant narrative. I didn’t want my first book to be an immigrant narrative.”

Still, the issue of identity is central to Ma’s work.

After high school, Ma went to the University of Chicago with the idea of perhaps becoming an archaeologist. “Dig things up, put things together, was my idea of an interesting way of spending my time.” That didn’t work out, and Ma tried anthropology and then economics. “I think I just ended up majoring in English because the Chicago winters are very long.” Ma quips, “You get depressed and all you can do is stay in the apartment and read Henry James.”

After college she worked at various publishing jobs. For a while she lived in Berkeley, California, and wrote for the East Bay Express. She attended a summer journalism fellowship at Northwestern’s Medill School, and wrote for the Chicago Reader. But Ma’s foray into journalism was short-lived. She lacked, in her words, “a journalist’s killer instinct.”

Instead, Ma found her home in fiction.  

“I think fiction is the space where you can explore things you would never do yourself in your own life,” she says. “[Fiction] is not about replicating reality. It’s actually about expanding experience. That’s really what you want to do, to go beyond experience.”

Read More