Student debuts collection of short stories exploring the effects of isolation

Isolation is lonely, but “A Shape and a Run” explores the shared shapes it can take.

Anthony Wong, a fourth-year biology and cognitive science student, published his debut book, “A Shape and a Run,” on April 28. Written during quarantine, the short story collection examines the different ways isolation affects people. Wong said it draws on the hopelessness, grief and anger shared by many during the pandemic, with each story centered around a particular cause of social, physical or other type of isolation.

“Another reason that I wrote the book was to make sense of the chaos in the world and to make sense of the chaos within each person,” Wong said.

[Related: Alumna releases debut novel exploring historical narratives through feminist lens]

The stories feature people’s responses to surreal situations, like one character’s struggle with the urge to murder an irritatingly upbeat man during an apocalypse, Wong said. The fictional worlds are vehicles for the turmoil that came out of the pandemic, he said, and the settings emerged as outgrowths as he fleshed out his characters. While he had been reading and writing about worlds completely separate from his own since childhood, the intensity of emotion he went through during the pandemic sparked his imagination for the universes in “A Shape and a Run.”

Compared to his previous, unpublished works, Wong said the stories in “A Shape and a Run” are much more raw and deal with subjects like grief, trauma and violence. The stories’ heavier aspects reflect the pain inflicted by the pandemic, which he said he juxtaposed with more lighthearted moments. Wong said this contrast managed to highlight the hope and humor that persists through hardship.

“If there was a person that I wrote for, I wrote for myself,” Wong said. “I wrote for anybody who is searching for hope in a world that seems increasingly hopeless and looking for a sense of meaning that perhaps in the past year, people have forgotten or lost.”

This sense of community extended to the publishing process through a crowdfunding campaign, said Brian Bies, the head of publishing at New Degree Press. Wong obtained his publishing deal through Creator Institute, a program that partners with publishing company New Degree Press to help authors build an audience and guide them through the publishing process. As part of the program, Wong crowdfunded more than $5,000 in preorders to demonstrate audience interest and offset production costs.

As “A Shape and a Run” is closely tied to the emotional turbulence that many people have felt throughout the pandemic, it touches on the ways people use technology to help and harm. In one story, Wong said he plays with synecdoche – a literary device that expresses an entire entity using one of its parts – to convey the sense of detachment that can come from reading the news. While the collection explores ways that technology can benefit people, it also examines how technologies that are neutral to begin with, like social media, can become destructive when people cross a moral line in pursuit of their goals.

[Related: UCLA students launch PeerUp, an anonymous peer-led mental health resource]

Regarding the writing process, Wong said writing about vastly different worlds came naturally as he explored individual characters’ responses to their circumstances. While the stories’ writing styles take after authors he admires – like Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway – inspiration also came from surprising places. For example, after coming across the phrase “unkillablebynone” in a YouTube comment, he used the vulnerability that it embodied as inspiration for a short story. In that story, a character seeking a sense of belonging believes he finds it, but it turns out to be a facade.

“It takes both an inordinate amount of empathy and raw emotion and imagination to make it work,” Wong said. “What I found was that as long as I was writing honestly for the character, it tended to carry the story along.”

Though each short story can be read on its own, the arrangement of the stories makes its own journey toward hope, even as it acknowledges darker moments of isolation. Wong’s editor, Jessica Fleischman, said “A Shape and a Run” begins on a more pessimistic note but ends more hopefully to reflect the emotional journey that many went through during the pandemic.

“Every book does not appeal to every person, and it’s interesting with Anthony’s because his topic is so universal that I think everyone will find a little bit of themselves in his characters and in his stories,” Fleischman said.

Looking ahead, Wong said he plans to publish another short story collection or novel. He said he has conceived several story ideas, some stretching back to middle school, and he has recognized their potential as they have developed and matured over the years.

“Even as I was doing coursework, … I pushed myself to explore,” Wong said. “Reading and imagining a world outside of my reality was very natural to me – I’ve been doing that since I was a kid.”