We are grateful to host regional writer Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn at the Whale to celebrate her new essay collection, I Have a Thing for Flowers! Structured like an herbarium, each essay pairs a flower with a person from Sawchyn’s life to compose a delightful blend of botanical research and intimate meditations on love. Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn will be joined in conversation by local poet, multimedia artist, and educator, Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Six months before her wedding, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s fiancé broke off their engagement. Stunned, reeling, and newly uninsured, Alysia married her friend Sarah in an arrangement that secured them both free health insurance. They moved in together in the midst of the pandemic, and, with time and while tending a garden, their marriage of convenience grew into a marriage of love.

In science, art, and mythology, we cannot help but to see flowers as metaphors for the fleeting nature of youth, vitality, and love. It’s easy to casually admire something beautiful, but it takes a discerning eye to appreciate the effort that went into nourishing and tending to that beauty. In both gardening and relationships, one cannot expect to fill your garden with flowers if you are unwilling—or unable—to put in the work they need to thrive. In I Have This Thing For Flowers, Sawchyn does just that, likening the many flowers she has grown in her gardens to a range of relationships and moments of her life, reflecting on topics from motherhood to perfumery to scientific illustration.

Cataloguing many of the great romances and loves of her life like an herbarium of flowers preserved from the garden, Sawchyn examines the kinds of love that can’t be explained.

DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is the author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and her video work has been exhibited at Miller ICA. A Kundiman and MacDowell fellow, Nguyen teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Randolph College and the University of Pittsburgh.

ALYSIA LI YING SAWCHYN teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Her essay collection A Fish Growing Lungs was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards, and her second book, I Have This Thing for Flowers, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Formerly the editor-in-chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

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