Just One Thing with Rui-Yang Peng

The author’s father during a family hike.

Sometimes it seems too easy to describe a piece of writing as powerful, but Rui-Yang Peng’s September issue memoir “Picasso Face” is just that. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“Many of my pieces originate as incarnations in other forms (poems, micros, flash). This story began as a poem I wrote over a year ago entitled ‘there’s a piece missing’ which was an exploration in how negative space (and its absence) can figure in our lives. Since then, I’ve shifted to writing primarily prose with an emphasis on a realistic style, but for me the lines of fiction and memoir are blurred; I will never be able to tease them apart again. I started rewriting the poem with the negative space as my skeleton, and from there built up the story in a series of vignettes pieced together from conversations with friends and my father regarding the relationships I had with my mother, with girl friends. As the story evolved, my main goal was to preserve the emotional integrity and authenticity of the story, even if the moments I portrayed were fictional and not autobiographical. I liken my process for this piece to a technique I experimented with in art class, where we charcoaled an entire paper black and chiseled out the details with an eraser. A chiaroscuro, perhaps, yin & yang constantly in flux.”