Restless Curiosity: L'Amour Lisik interviews H Felix Chau Bradley

H Felix Chau Bradley

Managing Editor L'Amour Lisik talks with H Felix Chau Bradley, fiction judge for our 2026 Open Season Awards (accepting entries now, with an Early Bird discount until September 30). They discuss live readings, the humbling experience of learning a new language, and their novel-in-progress, Lazy Tongue.
[photo credit: Hamza Abouelouafaa]

 

H Felix Chau Bradley is a writer and editor living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021), which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize. Their stories and essays can be found in carte blanche, ESPACE art actuel, the Ex-Puritan, Feeld magazine, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. They are the fiction editor at This Magazine and a book columnist at Xtra. Felix is this year’s winner of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Max Margles Writing Residency, and is writing their first novel.


Your short story “Brood” recently appeared in spring issue #230. Pigeons reflect the tension in the main character Sal’s life, with the birds functioning as both metaphor and physical flock. Can you talk about the beginnings of “Brood” and your writing process in general when it comes to short stories?

A story often begins with a feeling that I want to arrive at. With that feeling in mind, I mull over the different potential narrative arcs for a long time, often while walking around the city, before starting to write the thing down. My stories generally do not mimic my real life, but in the case of “Brood,” I was in fact struggling with a pigeon problem on my apartment balcony. I was curious about why the birds made me feel so agitated, and decided to write a story in which the main character’s pigeon-related stress was rooted in a deeper, more long-lasting agitation, born of gender trouble and familial conflicts. The pigeons were also an attractive theme for me because the way that humans fight with birds in urban space is often pretty funny in its futility–the brooms, the flailing arms, the netting, the yelling. I always want my stories to have a humorous edge, maybe especially when they are dealing with more painful subject matter.

Your book of short stories, Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021), revolves around “young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online.” Identity, queerness, and belonging feel key to this collection. Are there any particular books, short stories, authors, or artists you turn to when searching for works exploring these themes?

A few weird Asian writers I admire are Johanna Hedva, Anelise Chen, Pamela Lu, Yoko Tawada (her older works, mainly), Eugene Lim, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I just had the pleasure of reviewing The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, by Lana Lin (for my books column in Xtra), and felt so energized by Lin’s critical reimagining of/conversation with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In terms of short story writers I turn to for structural and tonal guidance, I’m a big fan of the Argentinians: Julio Cortázar, Mariana Enriquez, and Silvina Ocampo all come to mind.

You’re set to spend three weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland to work on your first novel, Lazy Tongue. Can you tell us more about your novel-in-progress and what you hope to gain from your artist residency?

Having started off as a short story writer, I’m trying my hand at novel-writing, which is a stretch for me, but a useful one, I think. I was wondering what would happen if I had to hang out with a character for longer than a few thousand words: How uncomfortable would things become, and would that discomfort be generative? I began to take Cantonese language lessons in my late thirties—it’s my mother’s first language but I never learned it growing up. It is one of the more humbling experiences I’ve had in a long time: as someone who hasn’t had much trouble functioning in both English and French, I’m discovering that my language skills do not transfer over to Cantonese at all. Lazy Tongue is a novel about what we inherit from our parents and what we fail to grasp about them; it’s also about the pains and pleasures of queer relationships, and about discomfort and failure and fear. It’s also supposed to be funny, though I know that description doesn’t make it seem that way!

I’m so honoured to have been chosen by the Quebec Writers’ Federation to be the Max Margles writer in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre this fall. I’ve never visited Ireland before, and I’m looking forward to writing and thinking there, and to meeting other writers and artists at the Centre. I’m especially looking forward to having three uninterrupted weeks in which to work on the novel. I’m normally so easily distracted and overwhelmed by other responsibilities and concerns; I want to give this project the attention that it needs.

As a writer and editor, what advice would you give to emerging writers looking to submit to regular submission calls and/or contests?

Be bold and submit your work widely. Don’t get too discouraged by rejections, because they happen all the time to all of us. Make yourself a submissions grid to stay organized. Read—a lot. Read your own piece out loud to yourself once or twice before submitting: you’ll get a better sense of where its language or its rhythm might need tweaking. In general, I highly recommend doing live readings when you can: your mileage may vary, of course, but audience response can be a great way to learn more about how your writing is coming across to other people.

What styles, techniques, content, etc. do you enjoy when reading short stories? What will you be looking for in a winning Open Season short story?

I’m looking for short stories that excite me on a sentence level, that feel grounded in character and place, that use the constraint of the short form in surprising ways. I’m hoping for stories that make me ask new questions, that plunge me into a state of restless curiosity. I love to find out that I’m wrong about something, or that I don’t know as much about a certain topic or subject position as I thought I did.

 

L'Amour Lisik

L'Amour Lisik