Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction is playful abecedarian speaks back to its titular epithet by looking both figuratively and literally at the navel. It includes the curious state of lint and bacteria and what humans have been known, disgustingly, to do with them (hello, navel cheese!). Also appearing: Hawaiian and Hindu origin stories rooted in the navel that connect us, with urgency, to the divine; the role of the navel, our first wound, in and after human birth; a story of the author's own regrettable 90s-era teenage navel piercing and the plastic surgery that removed her mother's navel, and more.
Styled as a self-referencing cabinet of curiosities, this chapbook provides compounding insight into the navel. It is also a Rorschach for the genre of creative nonfiction. This text demands you be swayed to see what, in fact, is so good about looking at one's own navel after all.
Anjoli Roy is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu.She earned a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. A VONA fellow, she participated in Bich Minh "Beth" Nguyen's memoir workshop in summer 2018. Anjoli's book-length manuscript of creative nonfiction stories, "Where the Water Is," is on the C&R Book Awards Longlist for CNF/Memoir and has been a finalist for the 2040 Books James Alan McPherson Award and the Autumn House Nonfiction Contest. Her award-winning and nominated standalone works include "Tigers, Woman, Eels: A Family Narrative," winner of the COG Page to Screen Award judged by Gish Jen; "Little Red BMW," first runner-up for StoryQuarterly's Fourth Annual Nonfiction Prize, judged by Brian Blanchfield, forthcoming; "Birthing Ancestors," nominated by Waxwing for a Best of the Net award and a Pushcart Prize; and "Love Letter to Kurseong," third-place winner of the Ian MacMillan Writing Awards for Creative Nonfiction. She has also published with The Asian American Literary Review, Entropy, Hippocampus Magazine, Kweli, Longreads (this essay was also featured on Memoir Monday), River Teeth, Spiral Orb, and others. Additional forthcoming writing will appear in Read Water (Locked Horn Press, winter 2020) and Kaleidoscope (spring 2020). Anjoli is PhDJ for "It's Lit," a literature and music podcast that she cohosts with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng and has featured more than 100 writers to date. Anjoli is from Pasadena, California. She is a mashi to eight, a godmother to one, and the last of her parents' three girls. She loves cats, surfing with loved ones or alone, and the rain that she and her partner oftentimes wake up to in Pālolo Valley. You can find more of her work at www.anjoliroy.com. She tweets @anjoliroy.
