Helen Chau Bradley is a queer, mixed-race writer, musician and arts administrator living in Montreal. Chau Bradley’s essays and stories have been published in several literary magazines.
Fiction (Short stories)
Personal Attention Roleplay
Montreal: Metonymy Press, 2021.
on order
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships—with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.
The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
Poetry (Chapbook)
Automatic Object Lessons
[Montreal]: House House Press, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Automatic Object Lessons is a collection of collaged fragments, gathered and scrambled from the app-generated phrases of an online language-learning program. The resulting poems expose the insidious and oppressive nature of social norms and the mundane language that maintains them, through repetition, juxtaposition, and an obsessive fixation on the moods of household objects.