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Author Spotlight: China Braekman
China Braekman won 1st prize in Non-fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her piece “Peeling Tomatoes.” It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: China, thank you so much for your beautiful submission. What stood out to all six judges was the enduring strength of your storytelling and the vividity of the scenes in “Peeling Tomatoes.” What inspired this story?
China: Thank you! I’m humbled and looking forward to reading the other selected works. Early on in the essay, I reference Sam Contis’s photobook, Deep Springs. It’s a beautiful book that documents life at Deep Springs college, a ranch on the border of California and Nevada and, until recently, an all-male school. I won’t be able to do them justice, but the pictures in the book convey an intimacy that moved me deeply ever since I first saw them. I found myself often returning to those photos and drawing connections with experiences I was having or things I was seeing around me. Later, when I had the experience I describe in the essay (of seeing my partner’s look-alike on the streets), I once again returned to the pictures in Deep Springs. The experience unsettled me in a way that I struggled to describe with words; Contis’s photos were a more accessible starting point to unpack my thoughts.
CD: We all thought it was remarkable you could write so much in four pages. When did you begin to write in the non-fiction genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Why are you comfortable with it?
China: Growing up in France, I didn’t read much in English, not to mention personal essays (the French style of “dissertation” we wrote in school actively discouraged using the first-person point of view!) For a long time, I viewed writing primarily as an academic exercise, a tool to put ideas into conversation, but not necessarily my own. It was only after I moved to the US, where I was reading and writing exclusively in English, that I felt the impulse to write for myself (maybe because it’s my first language, I also realized that I found English quite playful to work with). As a student in anthropology, I was reading ethnographies, which opened the door to reading memoirs, essays, reflections — texts that I couldn’t place as academia, journalism, or fiction. I’m drawn to non-fiction for this reason — because it maintains the guardrails of lived experience while escaping rigid classification — and I still have a lot to learn!
CD: “Peeling Tomatoes” is incredibly unique and the emotion is intense. It is hard to handle the fantastical aspect of this subject so well but you succeed. There are multiple themes throughout. What is the key theme for you in this?
China: I’m very compelled by the idea that we’re all, always, a bit lost in translation. This is not a new idea of course, but I often marvel at this fact, and the fact that we (as humans) are able to build things together despite this inherent gap in understanding. As a dancer, I’m also fascinated by body language and by the notion that the body sometimes has a mind of its own. In this essay, the body is that very special interface between us and others; it’s the medium through which we get to know others but it’s also what conceals them from us, and us from them.
CD: What I loved about this is how original it is, and how you pair the werewolf theme with a bigger theme of attachment. How did that develop? It reads like fiction but isn’t, how did you decide how to depict this non-fiction with the guise of semi-fiction (even as it isn’t).
China: The different scenes in the essay are moments that are like suspended in time (at least, that’s how I experienced them!) Concretely, they are scenes that happen in the dark and that share a sort of quietness, or stillness, which makes them a bit frightening. I felt the text as a whole had to reflect that eeriness, wandering ever so slightly into the territory of the supernatural.
CD: Is it hard to write a non-fiction story with so many moving parts, how do you decide what to keep, and what to trim?
China: I started the essay with two vignettes in mind: Sam Contis’s pictures on one hand, and the sight of my partner’s lookalike on the other. I think it was putting these two vignettes in conversation that revealed the others. My first drafts sounded pretty academic (there were one too many Freud citations!), so I tried to trim those portions down and focus on the more personal, recognizing that the essay would be stronger if it was more visual than cerebral. That said, this essay is very personal to me, so it was a long process to get the ideas out of my head and onto the page — trimming down was hard, but building the content up was an even bigger challenge.
CD: Tell us a little about what brought you to becoming a writer, what your story is there, and how it evolved from the time you began writing, until now?
China: Although I’ve always wanted to tell stories, for a long time, I didn’t think of writing as the main vehicle to do so. I gravitated towards other media to tell stories — dance, photography, and later, audio. I think the COVID lockdown played a role in my relationship to writing: without being able to be in the studio or “out in the world,” I was bubbling with thoughts that I didn’t know where to store. At that time, I was working on an audio project and I remember editing hours of recorded interviews; ultimately, the format didn’t stick. I turned to writing instead, and things slowly started to flow from there.
CD: You took some risks with this piece, as it’s untraditional with the tie in to the werewolf element. Did you think your writing would be received with as much love as it has been, when you submitted? Or did you fear the readers wouldn’t get what you were trying to say? (We totally did get it and loved it!).
China: I think I tried pretty hard to give the essay some kind of logical flow. As a reader myself, I feel reassured by knowing there is an overarching logic, so I felt that I had to reproduce that in this piece. Eventually though, I gave up on sticking to a rigid or narrative structure, and it helped unlock more ideas. That process of letting go is what inspired the first paragraph, in which I ponder how we sometimes know things even without understanding why. That section is a bit of a meta nudge at myself to trust my reader and leave space open for interpretation.
CD: Can you talk to us about writing this short non-fiction piece and how you began writing in this style and what your objective was in writing this and submitting it to an award?
China: I had no audience or purpose in mind when I started the essay. I only started jotting notes down because I didn’t want to forget. The experience I describe in the essay was intense emotionally, but also sensorially (the way this person moved, the way things felt so silent) — so much so that I wanted to hold onto those details in the future.
Author bio: China is a dancer and writer living in Jersey City, NJ. She was raised in France and has been living in New York / New Jersey for the past ten years. She currently works for the International Rescue Committee, an organization that supports refugee resettlement in the US and delivers humanitarian aid in crisis-affected areas around the world.
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including China’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
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