Mia Arias Tsang: On Small Presses, Messy Queer Heartbreak, and Her Debut Collection ‘Fragments of Wasted Devotion’
Picture this: you’re seventeen, and you have just experienced your first heartbreak. What may seem like the worst thing to occur will only stretch across time, through college, your first job, and shifting identities as you come into your own. While it seems to get worse, you start to learn more. The heart is like a muscle; it only gets stronger the more you exercise it.
In Mia Arias Tsang’s debut literary nonfiction collection, FRAGMENTS OF WASTED DEVOTION (Quilted Press, 2025), she explores this development in her own experience with love from a lesbian perspective. Through personal narrative, she weaves a journey that spans seven years and across the country, supplemented by surreal illustrations from artist Levi Wells. Through putting together this collection, Mia learned to utilize her own skills and the support she gained from the communities around her, as she emphasizes the importance in finding one’s own path in publishing.
I spoke with Mia over Zoom to discuss the process of publishing on a small press, the intersection of love and art, and queer representation.
Ava Sharahy: You have your debut out. What’s that experience been like, as well as marketing around it? Because as I understand, you just had a book tour as well.
Mia Arias Tsang: Actually right now, I’m on a two week break, and the tour will continue in a week and a half, which I’m very excited for. But this book was self-published on Quilted Press, which is a publishing collective, so it’s a couple different independent authors—it’s a combo of self-publishing and a small press. I like to describe it as self-publishing with friends. The reason I bring this up is that because I’ve been doing so much—every part of the process is just me pushing it forward for the most part, with a little bit of help from Alex, the founder of Quilted Press. But I think because of that, I haven’t really taken a pause to bask in it really at all. I feel like it will really start to hit me in the coming weeks when the book starts to make its way to more readers. My friend Chloe always says, “It’s not pub day—it’s like pub life.” It’s the rest of your life that the book will be out, and you’ll get to reap the rewards of that.
But the tour has been amazing. I’ve never done anything like this, so I’ve just been really taking it in. I was just in Philly on Friday, and I think that event crystallized for me a lot of what has been so special about this process. That event was hosted at this incredible bookstore called Giovanni’s Room—my partner lives in Philadelphia and loves this store. We went in together and I just walked up to them and was like, “Hey, I have a book coming out. You probably have not heard of me at all, but would you be willing to host an event?” They were open to it, but they said, “You may wanna get a Philly-based writer to do it with you.” That day that we were at the bookstore, I found this zine outside, and I bought it and I read it. It was a diary of this woman, Holly, chronicling her first year of transition. I read it, I loved it, and she had put her phone number in the back. So I just texted her and I was like, “Hey, I’m a total stranger, but I found your zine at Giovanni’s Room for a dollar. Would you like to do an event with me?” And she was like, “Oh my God, yes stranger, I would love to do an event with you!” I think it was just such a magical example of how community can really come together and make something beautiful happen. You don’t necessarily need the power of an institution behind you or a major publisher to have an incredible book event. So I think if that is any indication of what the rest of the tour is going to be like, I cannot wait. I’m very excited.
AS: What’s the kind of work involved in this hybrid of a small press and self-publishing?
MAT: I have a lot of friends who are published by more traditional presses. From having viewed their journeys and their book trajectories, I would say the number one difference is that self publishing can be way faster if you want it to be, and I did want it to be. From start to finish, I put the manuscript together. It was all pieces I’d already written over the years, so it wasn’t like I was writing it from scratch. That was June of last year, and then the book came out in February, so that’s eight months of a turnaround. Whereas with a major press, you probably have to wait a year and a half to two years for your book to come out.
What was really cool about it was getting to be involved in every single step. I listed my own book on NetGalley, I was deciding who it went to, I was the one who was reaching out to authors for blurbs, I nixed a lot of covers I didn’t like because I really wanted it to be perfect.
In terms of marketing, I did a little meme campaign on my Instagram—my girlfriend knows Photoshop. I do not. So they were helping me edit my book into different celebrities’ hands, and I was posting them. From what I’ve heard anecdotally, even if you’re with a bigger press, you still end up having to do a lot of legwork on your own if you’re not a megastar, celebrity author. Why not do all of this stuff on my own, in a way that lets me have agency and control over my book? The interior [of the book] was entirely laid out by my dad—he used to be a graphic designer for many years, so he has laid out books before. He was like, “We have someone that we contract out sometimes to do the interior, but I will do it for free because you’re my daughter, and I think it would be cool to do a project with you.” That was really heartwarming. It was labor-intensive, but what I’ve been telling people is that it’s not easy, but it’s so much easier than you would think to do it.
AS: I want to talk about the book itself: one of the things I noticed is how much music plays a large part in the book. You have these mentions of songs and you take deep dives into entire albums, and how they influenced you at the time that they came out. I was wondering what role music plays in your writing.
MAT: Music is everything in my writing. I cannot write without music. I know there are a lot of people who need silence to write—if I do not have tunes, I can’t think. The way I write, I’m really trying to tap into something untouchable, which makes it very hard. But I think music is able to capture this sort of intangible, pure emotion, in a way that not many other art forms can. It’s just something you can’t really put your finger on—it’s a feeling.
For my fiction projects, I always make a playlist for the book itself, or the project, whatever it is, and individual playlists for major characters. That’s both songs that remind me of them, and songs I think that they would like and listen to. I will listen to them while I’m writing to get myself into the headspace and the emotions that the book requires.
I think so much of the way I’ve been able to track time is through music and the songs I listen to. I don’t have a journaling practice, but what I do have is a monthly Spotify playlist practice that has been going on since, at this point, 2021. I’ve been doing this for four years and I do one every month. It really helps me to go back in time to access what I was feeling by listening to the songs I was listening to, and getting snapped all the way right back to those moments. If not the specific details or memories, I’m at least getting back to the feeling and I can re-access that.
AS: Given how personal Fragments can get, you acknowledge within the text itself about how past partners could potentially read it. There was this one moment where a past person commented about the idea of “earning an essay,” and I was wondering how you balance giving a subject an appropriate level of privacy and confidentiality, while still keeping a level of detail to the work?
MAT: Every piece in this collection is addressed to a “you” figure. I wouldn’t say that they’re written in second-person, because there is still an “I” speaker—it’s me, and I’m still in the piece. But I think framing it as a direct address and not including any names and not taking it to third-person, it brings a kind of immediacy and intimacy of like, I’m talking directly to you as the person that I’m addressing this to.
This book is about a lot of different people, but I think that by making it addressed to a consistent “you” and not specifying that they’re about different people can help—I like the ambiguity. It helps with navigating the privacy thing, because these could all be one person, this could be two people, this could be seven people. A stranger who doesn’t know me is not going to know, you know? That gave me a bit more flexibility to play around. I like to think of this as an Easter egg hunt for my very close friends, and then for everyone else it just can be whatever it is.
Ultimately, writing about other people is always gonna be fraught, no matter when or how you do it, especially intimate relationships. People’s reactions vary so wildly; there’s the one person who, as you said, was like, “I really want to earn an essay.” I was like, “You want to break my heart really bad? Okay, good to know in advance.”
But when you’re a writer, you just have to tell the stories you have to tell. And I know that I did not set out to villainize anyone in this—I was just trying to be honest about my experiences of these relationships. I can stand by it because I have tried to make these not seem like just straight-up villain-victim situations, because relationships are not like that. This is a collection of heartbreak essays, sure, but I tried my best to not make them feel super bitter or feel like personal attacks, because for the most part they’re not supposed to be—they’re just what happened to me.
AS: Talking about the role that you play within your own writing, what was it like writing about past events or your past self? Throughout the book you’re looking back on some very difficult and very messy moments. Did you learn anything about yourself in the process of writing Fragments?
MAT: These pieces were all written in real time over the course of seven years. For the most part, I was not sitting back years later and reflecting on my own behavior, and then writing them. It was mainly, this breakup just happened and I’m in the thick of it.
The earliest piece I wrote was when I was seventeen years old. The first time I looked at it since I had written it was last summer when I was doing manuscript edits. So imagine looking back in time to something your seventeen-year old self wrote when she had her first heartbreak, and has no idea how bad it’s ever gonna get. I had found some mental peace and emotional peace with the things I have gone through in my life that I was mature enough and stable enough to look at that piece and many others with empathy for my younger self, as opposed to deep cringe. That felt really good—for the first time I was reading it and I didn’t feel like I hated myself. I just wanted to travel back in time and give her a hug.
Editing those pieces felt like I was talking to myself across the years. It was one-sided, but I felt like I was listening to my seventeen-year old self talking about all the pain she felt. It felt like a privilege to be able to go back to those words and tinker with them with what I know now, but still making sure that I stayed true to what she meant when she wrote those words and the feelings that she was trying to capture—I didn’t wanna lose that essence. I just wanted to elevate the language to what I know I’m capable of now as a writer. That was a cool exercise, and to be able to do it with the least amount of self-criticism and intense judgment that I usually struggled with when looking at my own stuff was really valuable and moving. This whole book process helped me to have to be kinder to my past self and my past writing.
AS: Since these pieces do go back seven years, while putting together Fragments and while editing it, how did you notice, throughout the years, your writing style develop and change with each piece?
MAT: The pieces in the book are roughly organized in chronological order, and I think you can feel my writing getting better as [you’re] reading it. I wanted it to feel like, by the time you get to [the end], you’re realizing the narrator has come to some sort of conclusion about how she wants to move forward in her love life, or life in general.
What I’ve noticed the most is that my writing has gotten more lyrical. That’s mainly due to a lot of the stuff I’ve read since the first piece in this book was written. I read a lot of really experimental nonfiction in the past couple of years. Eileen Myles is a huge influence of mine. A lot of their syntax and the stream-of-consciousness way they write has really impacted my style. And of course, Maggie Nelson. I read Bluets sophomore year of college, and that was the first fragmentary style that I had ever seen.
When I was younger, I felt very constrained by form, and I felt like prose had to look a certain way, it had to sound a certain way. It couldn’t sound like music. It couldn’t sound like poetry. The more I exposed myself to other forms of writing, the more I realized that wasn’t true. I also want to quickly shout out Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays for The Paris Review. He used to have a column there, and reading his nonfiction also transformed what I thought nonfiction could read. He’s such a musical writer, and his essays are very lyrical. I feel like I’ve given myself more permission to play and mess around, and break some of the rules of genre. I don’t know if this is poetry, I don’t know if this is nonfiction; this is whatever I want it to be.
AS: You point out in a few sections this intersection between your relationship with art and writing, and your relationship with love and with people. Do you think that the two inform each other? If so, how?
MAT: I mean, all art is about three things, right? Suffering, love and death. I don’t know if it’s true everywhere, but at least in America, [there’s] not really respect when people, especially women, write about their love lives or their romantic lives. It’s not considered high art or true art. The minute that a man writes about his emotions in a book, it’s “Whoa, look how amazingly he captures the human experience and vulnerability.” The minute a woman is writing about her love life it’s, “Oh my God, this bitter woman can’t get over anything.” On the one hand, yeah, I can’t get over anything. Also, do we not all, as human beings, experience love and or desire in our daily life?
When people ask me what my book is about, I have to say, it’s a collection of letters to my exes. My immediate feeling inside is a bit of shame and a bit of cringe, like, “I can’t say this is a slim and urgent collection interrogating the most important philosophies and political issues of our time.” Because it’s not that; it’s a collection of letters to my exes, and that can still be really important and powerful.
I wrote this for other women, hoping that another seventeen-year old girl is gonna go through her first weird situationship heartbreak thing, not knowing how to navigate it, being alone in college for the first time, just like how I was, and find this book think, “I’m not the only person who’s ever had these feelings; someone else gets it.” I’m hoping that this book can kind of give people permission to feel their own grief. I actually said something similar in one of my pieces about Julien Baker’s music, how it gave me permission to feel my own grief. Sometimes that’s all you need to get out of the grief, to not have someone poking you with a stick, telling you to move along, and instead have someone to open their arms, [and] cry in them for as long as you need. That’s kind of what I hope this book is—the book version of that.
AS: It’s interesting hearing you talk about how you wrote this book for other women, and I was wondering how your lesbian identity informs your work—particularly within Fragments, but also just your writing as a whole?
MAT: Oh my God, everything I read is gay as hell. I mean, yeah, I think ’lesbian’ was the label I always felt the most attached to, or the one that I found the most power in. Out of all of my different intersectional identities that I have—I’m multiracial, I’m Latina, I’m Asian, I am a woman, but above all, I am gay. For a lot of different reasons, I didn’t connect a lot to my racial background until I got a bit older. I grew up in a very small, rural, very white town, and so I was one of the only people of color in my entire school, so I didn’t feel a huge connection to my own culture in a way that I could claim it as my number one identity. I didn’t really want to claim womanhood in the typical sense. I’ve always been a girly girl, but I also had this weird thing going on under the surface. I’ve always known I was gay, or that something was up, before I had the language for it. When I found the term lesbian, I finally accepted it for myself—I felt like I was coming home to something. Because of that, it diffuses everything I write. It’s just such an integral part about the way I live my life and all my writing. Whether it’s in fiction or whether it’s in nonfiction, my life is bleeding into it. They tell you to write what you know, and what I know is dyke drama.
I think that’s a hard question for me to answer because what isn’t in my life influenced by my queerness, what isn’t influenced by my lesbian identity? My breakfast is influenced by my lesbian identity, because I’m the one cooking it. It’s so ingrained in everything I do and everything the way I move through the world.
AS: In particular, I’m also interested in this idea of exploring queerness through a lens of not being perfect, being messy.
MAT: This is my favorite thing to talk about. I was born in ’99, I wasn’t even really around for the AIDS crisis or any of the other giant defining fights for liberation that queer people had to fight. All of that, its basis is in sex; it’s the sex we’re having, it’s the sex that we’re not having or want to have.
But I think that there has been just this increasing turn of a tide politically and on the left with younger people of this idea of purity; not just sexually, but also morally. If someone makes a mistake or says the wrong thing, or breaks up with their girlfriend in a less than ideal way, suddenly you have all of Bushwick coming after them. I think we have to get better as a community at understanding when it’s like an interpersonal issue versus like a political hill to die on. Conflict is always going to happen between people. Conflict is always going to happen in relationships. It’s just part of being human, and of interacting with other human beings. I think kids need to give themselves more permission to explore and make mistakes and find out who they are. That’s part of growing up, part of learning. Every relationship in this book taught me something incredible about myself, and I don’t just mean that in a purely negative way. I got amazing, really wonderful things out of every person that I wrote about, and I would ultimately never take any of them back.
I think there’s something really sad about the idea of writing off a piece of artwork or media because its characters are making mistakes or its characters are behaving badly—do we not want our media to reflect life as it is? If people are clamoring for quote unquote “representation,” do you not wanna see a real person behaving like a real person, which can sometimes mean behaving badly?
Striving for this kind of purity, or dreaming that you’re ever gonna live in a world where people are not gonna constantly hurt each other all the time, is setting yourself up for failure. And it’s not giving you any tools to deal with conflict when it actually arises. I consider myself an abolitionist; all of my beliefs about this ultimately stem from that, and to decide that other human beings are truly expendable and that you can just write them off is really harmful, and has led to the deep and burning moral war in this country that we can now see completely taking hold of. This is the end result of so many people thinking that it should be so easy to write off an entire group of people, with no attempts to reconcile, to understand each other.
AS: Another thing that I really loved about Fragments was all these really cool illustrations by Levi Wells. What was it like working with an illustrator, and how were you able to integrate the visual art with the writing? Were the drawings done to reflect the writing, or was it just sort of… Well, to kind of do whatever?
MAT: Levi is actually a very close friend of mine. We met in our first week of college; consistently, the entire seven years during which all of this was taking place, all the things I was writing about, our friendship was enduring throughout that time, especially through college. Levi has always been a super artistic person; wonderful brain, creative brain. Before when the book was just taking shape in my head, I had a piece—I believe it was “Venice”—I turned into a little pocket zine. I asked Levi if he would illustrate it, and so this is the first thing we ever actually worked on together. The drawings evoked the emotion of the piece that I wanted, despite not necessarily being a direct literal representation of what the piece is about.
When it came time to do the book and I was thinking about the length, I ran it by Alex; I was like, “Do you think it would be cool if this was illustrated?” And Alex was like, I really don’t see why not. I texted Levi, “Do you wanna illustrate a book, and we can split the money, and just do this thing that we’ve always wanted to do?” And he said, “100%, absolutely.” I sent him the manuscript and was just like, “Go crazy.” I gave him complete creative control. I did not ask to see anything. A month or two went by, then we hopped on a Zoom call and he went through his iPad, showed me every single piece, and what piece of writing they would belong to. I did not have a single piece where I was like, “That doesn’t fit.” A lot of the illustrations, they’re surreal. They’re little characters. They’re little guys. Levi is trans and so a lot of his work explores the inherent trauma of being in a body, and I think a lot of my writing, in an oblique sort of way, is also talking about that. Overall, I feel really lucky to have someone in my life that I can just so intrinsically trust their creative instincts and know that they’re gonna come out with something I love.
AS: In your author bio, you mentioned a novel that you’re working on. Do you still see yourself going through self-publishing and small presses? Or do you see yourself going to traditional publishing with future projects?
MAT: This entire process has completely shifted my mindset on what I want out of my publishing life. I do want to stick to small presses, if not continuing self-publishing. For my novel, I will probably try to take it to a small press, just because I would like to do a little bit less of the marketing side myself. But I no longer feel like there’s only one way to break into publishing, or that there’s only one way to be a writer. I’m now viewing it as, I’m gonna go where I think I can get the most support and I’m gonna make those choices.
AS: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
MAT: I think that a lot of people in the writing world are so convinced there is only one path, that it’s riddled with institutions and gatekeepers, and it’s impossible to break into or like, or it can feel impossible, right? I went to Yale for undergrad, and I think going there for four years as a woman of color, as someone who did not come from family money at all—I was on a full ride, full-need scholarship—I had a horrible experience there. Just abysmal and it really broke me. But I think the gift that that gave me was removing the glamor and shine from institutions for me, and making it very clear to me that they are not ever a place to go and look to for salvation.
Those four years really taught me that institutions, the value and the glamor of it is a facade and it’s not necessary to have the life that you want. What does the approval of an institution that mistreats you, that funds genocide and funds defense contractors, actually mean to you? What are you looking to gain? Think about that really critically before you go out and decide it’s Big Five or nothing.
The main reason that I’d wanna go on a press is so that my book can get out to more people—not so that I can get any kind of accolades or clout or money. I mean, there’s no money in publishing, so I’m not getting money regardless. It would only be because I would want my stories to be out there in the hands of as many people as possible. In that regard, getting on a Big Five is gonna get your book into every bookstore in the country, and that is huge, but that’s a million-to-one chance in the meantime. I’m not gonna waste my time querying for ten years and waiting around, when I could be writing, I could be putting stuff out, and I could be getting them into the hands of people directly around me while I can. I think that’s really what it takes.
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Mia Arias Tsang is a writer based in New York City. Her work explores themes of queer desire, intimacy, and disconnect. Her first collection, FRAGMENTS OF WASTED DEVOTION, is out now with Quilted Press. She lives in Queens with her cat, Peanut, and is working on a novel.
