“Just like my own body, hybridity isn’t comfortable or pristine but, through its dance, moves our understanding into new dimensions.”

Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color who teaches creative writing at William & Mary. They also teach in Goddard College’s MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University’s Mile High MFA Program in Creative Writing. Addie collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of Dear Twin (2019) and Unwieldy Creatures (2022), which was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee. They are 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.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS :

“An Endless Cycle of Witness: Claiming One’s Self, One Polaroid at a Time”

[Excerpt]

The first time I encountered the idea of a Polaroid as a teenager, it was in realizing that, through the Polaroid, a person (especially a woman or a person perceived as such) could be claimed. There is something about the object of the Polaroid—the weight, the border, the immediacy with which you hold it in your hand—that lends itself to a kind of possessive quality of whomever exists, frozen in time, in that little glass box. It occurs to me now that when we use the word Polaroid, it is interchangeable, referring both to the mechanism and the object it produces. It’s been years since I let anyone photograph me the way that I let her. I’m not sure I ever will again. But, as for trying to reclaim the me that used to open for only her, I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.

Artist Statement

I was born hybrid. Not just as an AppalAsian born to parents from separate cultural spheres—my mother a white woman from Nashville, Tennessee and my father who fled with his family from Nanjing, China in the late 1940s to live in Taiwan—but also as a mirror twin, the name for twins for whom the egg splits late (if it were to split any later, the twins would be born conjoined), which results in the twins being born with mirroring features. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me, then, that my gender and sexuality would also live on liminal planes, as a queer nonbinary person unable to ever live comfortably within any one realm of existence or identity. It is from all of these swirling environments I came of age as an artist in the ’90s, at a time when hybridity and interdisciplinary art was actively discouraged, resisted, or even feared. I’m thankful that we now make and receive art at a time in which the literary and arts world is slowly catching up to the porousness between generic boundaries, which has freed me (at least somewhat) from the previous constraints of the publishing world.

“An Endless Cycling of Witness: Claiming One’s Self, One Polaroid at a Time” represents just one facet of my engagement with hybridity—in this case, that which lives between photography, self-expression, and writing. My relationship to photography is deeply wedded to my understanding of my queerness, as well as my self-conception as a twin, and it is through those poles that I wanted to explore the physical fact of the Polaroid, as well as its imperfections as a medium. I’m most interested in the fissures and cracks and textures that can come to the foreground between the interplay of mediums like text and image, and how each language can inform or create tension with the other. Just like my own body, hybridity isn’t comfortable or pristine but, through its dance, moves our understanding into new dimensions.