KENOPHOBIA by FRENCI NGUYEN

from Issue 17 of Bat City Review

Note on the piece: “A longer version of ‘Kenophobia’ comprises my MFA thesis, written as a triptych of essays in experimental, fragmented forms that all explore through language and memory what exactly I meant at the time when I said that I missed my mother. She passed away in late-February 2023, just several months before I started my current PhD program. The focus of my dissertation is now my grandmother, who has forgotten my mother entirely due to dementia. I now write from the intersection of memory (loss), family history, family mythology, and the Vietnamese language.”

Originally from coastal Texas, Frenci Nguyen is a fourth-year PhD candidate on the creative nonfiction track at Ohio University who holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction degree from Miami University (Oxford, OH). Frenci was runner-up for the 2021 Betty Jane Abrahams Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Writing Award in Creative Nonfiction. Their nonfiction is driven primarily by fragmentation, language, nonlinearity, lyric compression, and experimental forms. Frenci’s work is forthcoming in The Offing and has appeared in HerStry, Harpur Palate, GASHER, The Citron Review, Bat City Review, Hippocampus, peculiar, and elsewhere.

Website: matthewbuxton.com

Instagram: @matthew_buxton