An Interview with K-Ming Chang, 2025 Carol Shields Banff Centre Scholarship and Residency Recipient
“My time at Banff was truly transformative and life-changing; the writers and mentors I met continue to inspire me every day.”
K-Ming Chang is the 2025 recipient of he Carol Shields Prize Foundation Scholarship and Residency at Banff Centre. We asked K-Ming some questions after her life-changing experience at the residency. Learn more about the scholarship and previous recipients on our programs page.
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction (CSPF): Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on at the moment?
K-Ming Chang: I’m currently working on revising a novel titled Needlemouth, which I consider my first foray into the horror genre (though I’ve definitely written horror in the past, this book is in direct conversation with many works of horror I love and admire), and I’m also currently drafting a novel about childhood best friends, one of whom is a cannibal, and the patriarchal cycles that they must decide whether to perpetuate or destroy.
CSPF: What are the major themes or ideas that your work contemplates?
K-Ming: I’m deeply interested in systemic cycles of trauma and whether it is ever possible to escape them or transform them, and I’m also interested in questions of refusal: is it possible to refuse what you’ve inherited? To wield it in a new way? Is it possible to refuse being consumed? To refuse your own future? To refuse your own present? I’m also interested in the eternal horizon of queerness, how it asserts itself in the present and how it summons us from the future. My work is also always interested in matriarchal lineages, relationships between women (whether familial, romantic, or platonic), and whether it is possible for women to save each other.
CSPF: What was the residency at Banff like for you? How has it supported your practice / the development of your craft?
K-Ming: My time at Banff was truly transformative and life-changing; the writers and mentors I met continue to inspire me every day, and I am so grateful to have gotten to share space with such brilliantly wild and unleashed imaginations. Everyone was extraordinarily generous and excited to have conversations, to deepen our ideas and our work and our love for the work. It truly felt like the possibilities were boundless and expansive, and it was especially meaningful and memorable to hear other residents read their work aloud. I have never felt more energized, inspired, and delightfully disturbed. Horror writers truly are the horizon.
CSPF: Who are the women and non-binary writers who have shaped your work? Or influenced your career?
K-Ming: There are so many! But some of the writers I was thinking of constantly at my residency include Marilyn Chin, Mariana Enriquez, Bae Suah, Qiu Miaojin, María Fernanda Ampuero, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Venita Blackburn, Vi Khi Nao, Helen Oyeyemi, and so many others. They have all shown me what is possible in the narrative form, and they all have a limitlessness to their language and storytelling that inspires me to be braver, more committed, more curious, more whimsical, more polyphonic. And maybe weirder...
CSPF: What is the importance of supporting women and non-binary writers?
K-Ming: So incredibly important, now and forever and always! I’m often confronted by the extreme contrast between the worlds I am writing toward and the world I write in; I think a lot about Ursula K. Le Guin’s quote about escapism, and how escape is always in the direction of freedom. A better world cannot come soon enough, and I think that the material ways we support women and non-binary writers make our writing and our lives possible, and can remind us that it’s never too late to make another world. I think these forms of support can be an act of hope, a way of keeping our collective hope and desires alive.
About K-Ming Chang:
Photo by Andria Lo
