Ma didn’t go to parties and in the summers, when most students left, she stayed. “But because it is a small town and I couldn’t drive, it removed a lot of distractions for me and kept me kind of focused.” She was homesick for Chicago the whole time and full of angst. When Ma moved to Ithaca, she hunkered down. You always feel the oldest at the age you are.” “I felt like I should have gone earlier, but it did turn out to be the right time. “I couldn’t go into debt for writing,” she says. Cornell in upstate New York won out because it offered the best financial package. She applied to ten schools and got two acceptances. On unemployment, Ma started what turned into “Severance” and looked into creative writing programs. Ma was working as a fact-checker at Playboy when the magazine closed the Chicago office. “The lesson here is that it is easier to publish a book.” “It seemed a little impossible.” She tried to get media gigs and even looked for work in New York with no luck. “I didn’t have a fast turnaround and that did push me into fiction eventually.” Ma always wanted to write fiction but never thought she would write a novel. “I just felt like I couldn’t get a significant foothold writing for magazines or publications and to be honest, I was really slow,” she says.

Ma has been teaching at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of Practice in the Art since 2017, but her road to stability was paved with uninspired office jobs.Īfter college Ma tried to find journalism work. I have all sorts of ideas when I live here.” I also felt inspired by Chicago,” says Ma, adding that besides the affordability factor and having a group of creative friends here, Chicago still has undeveloped pockets. When Ma finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago in 2005, she tried living in New York and then the Bay Area but returned to Chicago. She spent her teen years in Kansas, then made her way to Chicago for college. “Bliss Montage,” published this month, will get its share of praise as well.īorn in China in 1983, Ma’s parents moved to Utah when she was six. It was also a finalist for the Pen / Hemingway Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book. “Severance” won a slew of accolades including the Kirkus Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Whiting Award. Like her award-winning “Severance” (2018)-a satirical dystopian novel about an unfulfilled Bible production coordinator maneuvering through a zombie pandemic-apocalypse-Ma’s meditations on work and relationships are mischievously deep and entertaining. Ling Ma’s new collection, “Bliss Montage,” begins with a pampered wife living in a sprawling McMansion with one-hundred of her ex-boyfriends followed by seven equally clever and lushly outrageous stories. Author Ling Ma photographed in Chicago/Photo: Anjali Pinto

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