How do we live with the things that haunt us? This is the question at the center of Artist Fellow Jami Nakamura Lin’s speculative novel-in-essays The Girls of Godzilla, Illinois. This unique novel sets folklore—from both Edo period Japan and early modern Europe—against a suburban Chicago community equally haunted by the ghosts of the Protestant Reformation, the Meiji Restoration, and World War II incarceration.

Join us online for a virtual interview with Jami, where we’ll discuss collective memory, shifting attitudes toward ghosts, responsibility of the living to the dead, and the role of speculative fiction as a site of possibility and resistance. The interview will be followed by a selected reading from The Girls of Godzilla, Illinois and space for Q&A.