Alyssa Songsiridej on the Freedom of Alienation

“I didn’t develop my own instincts about what I wanted or what being good actually meant to me. I never quite figured that out for myself. And for many years, in my early twenties, it worked out okay. But then I kind of reached this point where I felt like I was reaching the limits of that, that I had sort of spun out the person that I had been for years, and I needed to do something else, but I couldn’t figure out what.”

Alyssa Songsiridej is an editor at Electric Literature. Her fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, The Offing, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and has been supported by Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the VCCA and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Little Rabbit is her first novel. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, she lives in Philadelphia.