by Writing Workshops Staff
2 months ago
Before Gills and Other Stories ever had a title, it had a question: how do a handful of drafted, unfinished storiesâscattered across years, cities, and a lifetime of border-crossingsâbecome a collection that feels inevitable? For Tuan PhanâVietnamese American writer, literature teacher based in Taipei, and now the author of the newly released Gills and Other Stories (Texas Tech University Press, 2026)âthat question became the engine of his next literary chapter.
Tuan came to WritingWorkshops.com as an already-accomplished author. His memoir Remembering Water: A Memoir of Departure and Return won the Hidden River Arts Panther Creek Award in Nonfiction and was published by Hidden River Press in 2023, after an excerpt earned the Talking Writing Essay Award. Born in Saigon and taken from the city as a child by boat, Tuan returned decades laterâa rupture and reunion that continues to shape nearly everything he writes. But a story collection is a different animal than a memoir: less a single journey than a constellation, and he wanted the structural clarity to build one on purpose.
In 2024, he joined the 12-Week Story Collection Draft Generator with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, a practicing physician and PEN/Bingham Debut Fiction finalist for her own collection White Dancing Elephants, itself a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut of 2018. Chayaâs framework is concrete: each writer submits three âanchorâ stories that serve as load-bearing walls for the rest of the collection, then gives and receives line edits on up to 200 pages of peersâ manuscripts, meets one-on-one with Chaya, and leaves the course with a mapped plan for finishing what theyâve started.
That architectural approachâtreating a collection as something built out of whispers, clippings, moods, glitter and straw, as Chaya describes itâgave Tuan the scaffolding he needed. For a writer whose material ranges from the back-alleys of Saigon to the sprawl of suburban Texas, across generations, languages, and diasporas, identifying the right anchors was everything. The peer edits, craft discussions, and one-on-one conferences with Chaya helped him see not only individual stories but the connective tissue between themâthe recurring pull of memory, water, displacement, and return that would ultimately give Gills its shape.
The result is a book that, in the publisherâs words, traces characters at the edge of survival or change, where the mundane and the uncanny brush against each other. A refugee returns to Vietnam decades after fleeing by boat, only to find himself swept into a troubling new kind of tourism. A child shuttles between separated immigrant parents, torn by loyalty and shifting ground. In rain-soaked Saigon, siblings trapped in a violent household undergo a strange mutation that cracks open the possibility of escape. A motorbike driver zigzags desperately across the city in search of proof of residence.
In a recent conversation with Texas Tech University Press, Tuan described Gills as, above all, a collection about placeâwith Saigon itself, its moods and atmospheres, serving as the true protagonist. Characters thread through one anotherâs stories in linked appearances: each one stars in their own piece, then returns as a cameo in someone elseâs. He named Stuart Dybekâs The Coast of Chicago, Shih-Li Kowâs Ripples, and Jhumpa Lahiriâs Roman Stories as touchstones for how a linked collection can hold a single city in its palm. Tellingly, the interlocking structure wasnât the plan from the outset. It emerged, he explained, from simply noticing that the stories he kept drafting shared themesâand that he couldnât stop returning to the same subject. He wrote most of the book while still living in Saigon, in the year and a half before the move to Taipei.
âI just wanted to capture what I saw and experienced every day there.â
â Tuan Phan, in conversation with Texas Tech University Press
The early reception has made clear that Tuan has arrived as a distinct voice in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American lettersâwith praise coming from some of the most respected writers working in that territory today.
NguyĂȘÌn Phan QuĂȘÌ Mai calls Gills âintimate in its details and soaring in its imaginationââa moving and wide-ranging portrait of contemporary Vietnam.
â NguyĂȘÌn Phan QuĂȘÌ Mai, global bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child
Andrew Lam writes that Gills âwonderfully bridges that chasmâ between Vietnam and its diasporaâa collection attuned to both the distances travelers cross and the ones that refuse to close.
â Andrew Lam, author of Stories from the Edge of the Sea and Birds of Paradise Lost
Tuanâs âresourceful, cunning, flawed yet brave charactersâ will stay with readers long after the last pageâpraise made all the sweeter by the fact that Chaya Bhuvaneswar was Tuanâs instructor in the very course that helped shape this book.
â Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of White Dancing Elephants: Stories, PEN/Bingham Finalist & Kirkus Reviews Best of 2018 for Debut Fiction and Short Fiction
The lesson embedded in all of this is the one Chaya models in her own career and passes to every student in the Draft Generator: finish what you start, and trust that the stories youâve been writing have been talking to each other the whole timeâyou just have to sit them in the same room. Gills and Other Stories is proof of what happens when a serious writer commits to that conversation, with a teacher who knows the form from the inside. With the collection now out in the world and his memoir continuing to find readers, Tuan Phanâs voice is one to keep followingâwherever it travels next.
Ready to turn your own scattered drafts into a finished book? WritingWorkshops.com connects writers at every stage with working authors, agents, and editors inside an online creative writing community built for real results. Whether youâre polishing your first short story or shaping an entire collection, our seminars offer expert instruction, an encouraging cohort of fellow writers, and a track record of alumni breakthroughs. Your publication story could be next.
Explore Our Online Workshops
