Eve Xin was one of our Fall 2025 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we do Q&As with our residents to feature them, their work, and their words. See our Q&A with Eve below, and explore more Spotlights here.
TSW: Tell us about your work, writing, or project. What are you writing these days? How is your work changing, and how is it changing you?
Eve Xin: I am a poet by instinct, and I live in the world of feelings and images. This year I started writing poetry voraciously, driven by the grief and rage of the world I feel and carry in my queer migrant body. It felt like an exorcism. After about fifty poems, the storm calmed, and with a clearer head, I started to write short stories. Poetry is like fire, passion & fiction is water, sustenance. Where would I be as a writer and person in this world, if not for the stories I have read and loved?
TSW: What is a question you’re asking yourself these days, and what is a question you or your work is asking of your reader?
EX: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver
How do we go on living, after witnessing the darkness that lives in our fellow earthlings? Hope & despair, violence & love have existed throughout human history, and will continue to exist. Many choose to walk around with eyes half-closed, and this is the way they can, or will survive. What does it mean to live? What can I, what can we do, with this precious, short life?
TSW: Who do you bring into the room with you when you write, and/or, who do you consider your work to be in conversation with? Who are you writing for?
EX: I write for the people who have lost home, are still finding home, or may never find home in their inner and outer worlds. I write for the people in Gaza who have lost their land and family, the immigrants and refugees in the imperial West threatened by fascist violence, the queer and trans people searching for chosen family, and more.
My journey as a migrant and writer has shown me that I am not always safe in the world we live in, but I also hold some forms of power and privilege. I want to use all of that, to speak honestly about the pain & the loss, the growth & the liberation.
TSW: What were you processing during our residency program? Did anything unlock for you? If so, what new entrance did you find for your work or for yourself as a writer in the world? And what caused that shift?
EX: I entered Narrative Shifts right in the eye of the storm of a major life transition, grieving the home I tried so hard to build as a migrant, and having grown too distant and different from where I started, to return to where I came from. For months I felt like a drifter out at sea, having lost or let go of everything familiar — home, country, family, community, work, school. Who was I without all of this, without the scaffolding of an ‘acceptable’ life? Which way to the future, when there is no path to follow?
Narrative Shifts was the cocoon that let me rest and absorb nourishment from fellow residents and facilitators during a very exhausting time. Despite or perhaps because of the virtual setting, I experienced true community & safety that allowed me to show up as I am, even if I did not produce or contribute anything. I was so surprised and proud to emerge with new work in a new genre that I gathered the courage and curiosity to try.
Writing will always be my raft, and a place like the Seventh Wave a warm current holding me as I float in the sea of existence. I hope the poems and stories I write can be a raft for someone else, too.
