Beyond Creating the Monster: An Interview with Addie Tsai

Content Warnings: abortion, IVF, parental abandonment

Addie Tsai (any/all) is a biracial Asian American, Houston-raised, queer, non-binary artist and writer who teaches at William & Mary. They earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. They are the author of the queer Asian young adult novel, Dear Twin (Metonymy Press), and the adult queer, non-binary, biracial Asian, Frankenstein retelling, Unwieldy Creatures (Jaded Ibis Press). They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel.

Unwieldy Creatures has received rave reviews from outlets like BookRiot, Electric Lit, The Advocate, Buzzfeed News, Ms Magazine, and a stunning blurb from MacArthur Genius Prize winner and Mississippi writer, Kiese Laymon.

Addie is the Fiction Co-Editor and Editor of Features & Reviews at Anomaly, contributing writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor-in-Chief at the LGBTQIA+ fashion literary and arts magazine, just femme & dandy.

I caught up with Addie over breakfast during the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle. We discussed our love for Frankenstein and the importance of writing queer villains and reclaiming classics.

Ashley Russ: You’ve written Unwieldy Creatures, a queer, biracial, nonbinary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This reimagining is haunting and beautiful, scary, and so relevant in our modern world. But before we dive into your book, can the two of us fans, or “Franken-stans,” geek out for a moment?

You first encountered Frankenstein in college. What drew you to it?

Addie Tsai: Always down to geek out! I was nineteen, the same age as Mary Shelley when she initially wrote Frankenstein. I was a sophomore in college, and I read Frankenstein in a Romantic Lit course. I was drawn to it on three levels.

As a biracial Asian person, I was really taken with the Creature’s story, as are many people of color, because the Creature is clearly defined as Other. In terms of the structure of the book, Mary Shelley refers to him as a creature until society turns on him. The creature becomes the embodiment of the projections of other people and is often referred to as those projections: daemon, ogre, wretch, fiend, etc. As somebody who lives in this society as underrepresented and as a person of color, I found that move to be a very interesting technique to illustrate how you can really internalize this alienation and demonization from society.

As a biracial Asian person, I was really taken with the Creature’s story, as are many people of color, because the Creature is clearly defined as Other. In terms of the structure of the book, Mary Shelley refers to him as a creature until society turns on him.

As someone surrounded by my father’s birth tongue, Mandarin, but not given any access to really learn it, I resonated with the Creature’s literacy narrative. The Creature acquires language by eavesdropping and reading, and that mirrored my relationship with language. With English, I learned through reading, and with Mandarin, I picked up little bits while watching my father speak with his friends.

As an identical twin, I was struck by how Shelley creates this fascinating duality between Frankenstein and the Creature. They have very different conflicts in the novel, but at points, they speak about their plight in almost the same phrasing.

I had not really done any real psychological work around this at the time, but I’ve experienced a long history of inconsistent maternal abandonment. I’ve always seen Victor Frankenstein as more of an abandoning mother than as a father, especially since he clearly participates in the creation in the ways that we tend to think about with motherhood. (Which is obviously not to say that there aren’t people from all genders that create and give birth.)

The last thing I would say is that I also feel that my father is a narcissist, and so there’s some of that vibe in there, too.

AR: Why has Frankenstein maintained such a powerful hold on you?

AT: I went through this incredibly difficult relationship with a narcissistic painter in my late 20s that ended in an abortion. It was a very paradigm-shifting moment in my life. Before we broke up, we had been working on a collaboration centering on Frankenstein. I would include poems I’d written about the novel and Mary Shelley’s life, and he would exhibit paintings. I picked up Frankenstein again, as a way of trying to understand narcissism and its impact on my life. I should mention this was 2008, before we spoke about narcissism in quite the voracity that we do now. From that difficult breakup, I began to study it like a self-help book. It was through studying Frankenstein that I became obsessed with it, that it, as you say, took hold.

In that examination, it occurred to me this could be the basis for an incredible dance theater adaptation. There are now a number of dance and theater adaptations of Frankenstein, but at that point, there were none. I was living in Houston, and I was an admirer of Dominic Walsh Dance Theater, a contemporary ballet dance theater company founded by artistic director Dominic Walsh, who’s become a dear friend. He had produced and choreographed literary dance theater adaptations that were complex and dynamic, such as Titus Andronicus and Romeo & Juliet, so I knew it was in him to do. I pitched the idea to him, and after a year of meeting at cafes and regurgitating all the various research and ideas I had for this kind of adaptation, we embarked on creating it together. It was an incredible experience.

Frankenstein remained with me. I wrote an unfinished theatrical work on the women surrounding Frankenstein and a memoir that explored my obsession with Frankenstein, as well as all the parallels my and Shelley’s life shared. Then, in 2019, and I don’t discuss this often when I talk about Unwieldy Creatures, my ex-spouse and I had begun the early planning stages of IVF. I started doing all this research. I went to seminars to understand more about the process, what would take place inside my body.

I became intrigued by the rise of access to reproductive technologies. Even though it’s still very cost prohibitive, many people are figuring out ways to get IVF, and they’re doing it for all sorts of reasons. This is no longer simply the cis woman who can’t get pregnant or the gay married couple that needs a surrogate. IVF has really expanded our notion of family. I tagged that as an interesting landscape to create a new Frankenstein. At the same time, even though these conversations were always happening in one way or another, we were seeing a real push for abortion bans in the United States, particularly in Georgia.

I felt this was very similar to the conditions under which Shelley created Frankenstein, in the sense that there’s a sphere of technology moving forward while the ethical concerns around technology are being challenged. Of course, not all the fears around technology are centering ethics but also power and control. And certainly, the abortion bans and the conversations around anti-abortion legislation are also deeply connected to what’s considered a life. IVF is absolutely a player in these conversations. So, all of that was going on in my mind.

At the same time, I was really excited about the rise of queer and POC-centered retellings in contemporary fiction, as well as those centering trans people, disabled people, or other communities that always had to find their own entry points into a canonized text that never included them.

AR: I’d love to hear your thoughts on why it’s important to reclaim classics.

AT: I was really excited about the idea of making a new Frankenstein that was modernized and would take on these themes. But also, I’m always writing books I want to read. Novels especially come up. Even though I really love Asian and Asian American literature, I feel very ambivalent about my ownership or claim of it because I don’t have the typical immigrant story. My father raised me and surrounded me with Chinese people and Chinese culture, but I didn’t feel I was able to access it because he kept us at arm’s length. Because my father was so strict, I didn’t get to hang out with my (mostly) American peers either.

I have always lived in this space of liminality, which is why Unwieldy Creatures isn’t only Asian and queer but specifically biracial. Almost every character in the book is biracial because I wanted to give voice to that complexity without centering whiteness.

I have always lived in this space of liminality, which is why Unwieldy Creatures isn’t only Asian and queer but specifically biracial. Almost every character in the book is biracial because I wanted to give voice to that complexity without centering whiteness.

So, I think it’s like anything—these are the stories of our youth just like they’re the stories of white people’s youths, right? Especially for millennials or older. We weren’t having conversations about diversifying the canon or about reading Black writers, reading Asian writers, or Indigenous writers or other writers of color. Certainly, we weren’t talking about reading queer and trans writers. We’re not going to find our place in it; we have to make it. I think that’s why the retellings have become so powerful for people.

AR: At UCSC’s Living Writers Series in the fall of 2022, you shared your process for writing your novel. You would read a chapter of Frankenstein and then write one of your own. Can you discuss that process?

AT: I started this book at this writing residency called Mary Shelley Month at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, just outside of Santa Cruz. I woke up every day and read a chapter at a time, in order, and wrote the parallel chapter in Unwieldy Creatures. I didn’t do that for the entire book as intensely as I did in the beginning. I wrote it this way for a couple of reasons. One, to just transport myself back to her universe, her tone, her language, etc. I always knew I wanted to merge Shelley’s diction with contemporary American English, but I also wanted to remind myself of the plots and subplots, themes, character relationships, etc. that signify strongly in the original novel.

Now, I will say that the biggest critique I’ve gotten about this novel is that it’s too faithful to the original…

AR: Why was it important to maintain such a strong connection to the original text? And, when you diverted from it, what were the considerations that made you do so?

AT: I very much see Unwieldy Creatures as a love letter to Mary Shelley’s original. All the old adaptations, especially in film and television, used to really frustrate me. They almost always stop at the creation scene, when Frankenstein is such a complex and rich novel that goes so far beyond creating the “monster.”

I hate to say this because, you know, Shelley is my girl, but I wanted to correct a couple of things.

First of all, now that we have a queer, POC narrative, whiteness was not going to be assumed. I wanted to make whiteness the villain in the story. And because I’m dealing with a narcissist who’s a woman, she needed to have an origin story that was complicated but didn’t excuse her. Dr. Frank had been traumatized by her father’s whiteness and had not figured out a way to do the work she needed because she became singularly focused on ambition.

I wanted to name the Creature, and I wanted the Creature to experience love. I wanted there to be a different story for the most othered character in Mary Shelley’s novel. I wanted to show what would happen if [Mary Shelley’s creature] somehow was given the chance at healing, at integration. Why couldn’t the monster have a love story?

AR: Is your novel less about mirroring Shelley’s warning [about ambition and unchecked power] and more about origin stories, found family and bodies?

AT: We’re thinking about ambition differently. It’s no longer a cautionary tale because we now know that many powerful (cis) men will stop at nothing. Ambitious people with harmful motives will stop at nothing. Power is an incredibly addictive elixir. So, there had to be something else going on now that we have this problem. Now that we have people who behave in this way and play with people’s lives and bodies, what are we going to do about it?

This is absolutely a story about chosen family. I wanted to give a narrative, particularly with Plum (the narrator who is our Walton parallel) and the Creature, that shows how, no matter what kind of history of trauma you come from, you can band together at the end. So, I think Plum and the Creature both have reasons for ultimately needing one another. I wanted the story to end in a place of potential rather than a place of destruction. Dr. Frank doesn’t get to have, or be, the last word.

AR: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House discusses the importance of portraying queer villains. Will you share your thoughts about that?

AT: Every single type of person, type of reader, type of lived, embodied experience in the world deserves to have all the levels of experience, all the psychological motivations—good, bad, complicated—represented in our stories. For a long time, for people of color, but especially for queer narratives, there was often the queer tragedy. Or the queer villain. We see that a lot in the queer coded characters in Disney, for example. And there’s been a lot of debate about what that means for future representation of queer characters. I think we deserve to have all of it. We deserve to have villains and we deserve to have sympathetic characters and we deserve to have complicated characters.

The real problem is not really the villain, right? The problem is when the only character that is queer or othered in some way is a villain. So, for me, this is not the case in Unwieldy Creatures because (almost) everyone’s queer.

AR: In choosing to retell Frankenstein, a book that you hold so dear, I wonder if fear ever affected your writing process. Was there ever a worry of not, for lack of a better way of saying it, “living up” to your mentor text? Was Shelley a welcomed guide or ghostly presence hovering over this project?

AT: I definitely felt like Shelley was with me, and I would say I was afraid of it until I started writing it. I went through some of my biggest terror around the science involved in the creation. I did a lot of research, but I’m still not a scientist. I’ve had a couple of scientist friends read it, and they would joke about things that don’t seem quite accurate, like how fast Dr. Frank is successful. But I also wanted that exaggeration (like in the original) to be there.

I had other friends who gave specific scientific feedback that was immensely helpful, in terms of the condition that the Creature is born with. I felt that the creation scene had to be grotesque but also human and not problematic. Because the Creature can be easily read, as in the original, as a disability narrative. I felt I had to make that clear in 2022. I was reasonably concerned and hopeful that the disability community would feel that I had honored disability narratives and disabled people in it.

I want people that read Frankenstein to like Unwieldy Creatures. I want people to feel included in it. I hope readers will see that I’m attempting to illustrate the harm of whiteness on queer people of color. And I’m just so thrilled that this book has really resonated with many people how I’d hoped that it would.

AR: Any plans for more Frankenstein projects in the future?

AT: A lot of people have asked me about sequels. And I thought, you know, Plum and Ko are the two characters that people want more of the most. This sequel is currently titled Unwieldy Loves, and it will center their relationship after Unwieldy Creatures ends, but it will also include a queer Asian historical re-imagining centering Anne Lister and Mary Shelley. And, news! I’ll be featured in an upcoming pick of Rainbow Crate Book Box, which will, ahem, feature an excerpt of Unwieldy Loves, so hit that subscribe button!

AR: After working so closely with Frankenstein, after loving it for so long, how has it changed for you? In what ways do you feel differently about it than you did as a student studying the text?

AT: It is truly surreal to have been with a book this long. I mean, there are a lot of books we’ve been with for a long time, of course, but rarely as intimately as I have with Frankenstein. There are books we love we reread over again, but they can stay static. My relationship with this text has, at this point, been over half my life.

What I find really exciting about this book and my relationship to it is that as I change and develop, and as things happen to me, the book gets more complicated and more multi-dimensional. It has been with me through all these important transitions in my life, and it continues to open up for me the older I get.

I’m now aware, in a profound way, that, “Oh, this is a book that I’m going to return to for the entirety of my life.”