Anelise Chen: “Then I changed it to third-person clam, and that was exactly how it was meant to be.”
Conceived by Mary Wang, Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses screenshots from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice.
During my conversation with Anelise Chen, she asked me why I had picked up her 2017 novel, So Many Olympic Exertions. The autofictional book follows Athena Chen, a graduate student who is struggling to write an American Studies thesis about sports. Recognizing that readers of literary fiction aren’t necessarily interested in sports writing, the author suspected I was one of them.
She was right. I have long despised all sports, with what I saw as their off-putting display of testosterone and disregard for beauty in service of efficiency. Yet reading Exertions made me realize that I actually live like an athlete: I see my work as a game I could win or lose. Writing, to me, is a painful expenditure of energy—my chances of success are minimal, and that success is only reachable through a continuous, punishing effort that wouldn’t look out of place in an athlete’s training schedule.
Exertions is less about sports than it is about the question of why we expend effort on things that have such little obvious value—whether it’s playing sports or making art—and, really, why we keep going at all. “From above, swimming looks effortless,” Chen writes. “With no visual cues to indicate distance gained or heights ascended, it’s easy to forget the fatigue concealed in the feat. It’s easy to forget that water is a weighty medium that requires tremendous strength to push through. It’s only up close that you can hear the ragged breath, the arms stroking wildly against the clock.”
Elements of Chen’s current book project—a memoir told from the perspective of a clam—can be on ’s blog The Daily. As the website’s “mollusk correspondent,” Chen has published explorations of the phylum through the lens of art history, geology, and climate change. The project got its start when, “after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary
