Q&A with Mathieu Parsy
A week where we get to publish nonfiction is a good week indeed! Within just three pages, “Cranes” by Mathieu Parsy intimately captures a traveler reckoning with the aftermath of Hiroshima, detailing some of its immediate destruction as well as its slow, creeping annihilation. This subject is met with sadness and remembrance, and we are very happy to to share an interview between Parsy and Mina El Attar, our Managing Editor, which further breaks down the writing of “Cranes.”
I loved the part where you wrote, 'A prayer feels insignificant, even selfish, but I let it rise anyway.' Do you often use writing as a way to understand your emotions or work through obstacles? Does writing help you process grief or heartache, or was this piece a new experience in expressing complicated emotions through writing?
Writing has recently been how I make sense of things I can’t yet articulate out loud. But flash fiction in particular has sharpened that instinct. The compression the form demands means you can’t circle an emotion indefinitely, you have to face it, name it, and trust the reader to meet you there. That discipline has become something I rely on, almost like a way of thinking. This piece was different, though. Most of the time I start with an idea and the emotion follows. Here, the emotion arrived first: the weight of the museum, the stillness at the Children’s Peace Monument, that particular kind of grief that has no personal address. Writing it wasn’t really about craft. It was about trying to be honest about something that resisted easy meaning.The prayer line came from exactly that tension. I didn’t want to resolve it. A tidy emotional arc would have felt like a betrayal of the experience. So I let the ambivalence stay on the page: the prayer that felt insufficient but rose anyway. That’s what writing does for me: it doesn’t fix the complicated thing, it just holds it still long enough to look at it.
As both a photographer and a writer, does photography usually inspire your writing? After taking photos, do you see the world differently, or do your feelings at the moment that you take a photo determine what you choose to capture? Which direction feels more familiar for you?
I’ve rarely used my photographs as a starting point for writing. The two practices live separately for me. But Hiroshima reversed that. It wasn’t the images I captured that shaped the writing; it was the feelings I carried when I raised the camera that determined what I chose to capture in the first place.
At Miyajima, the camera became a kind of shield. The beauty of the island — the gate, the water, the deer — was so immediate, so alive, that it gave me somewhere to put my attention after the museum. Framing a shot felt safer than standing still with everything the day had asked me to hold.
But then a bird flew by. I didn’t think about composition or light. I just felt something shift; Sadako’s story surfacing again, unexpectedly, in the flight of a real bird, and I pressed the shutter. That click is the moment the two practices collapsed into one. The photograph and the writing reached for the same thing: a touch of magic.
What motivated the choice of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ over a name or a different pronoun? Have you written it in another perspective first? Is this a familiar stylistic choice or did it feel like a challenge?
The “you” is my wife. We traveled to Japan together, and it felt natural to write a real story with the one person who shared the experience with me. Using her name or a third-person pronoun would have created distance I didn’t want. The “you” kept her close.
But the choice also does something beyond the personal. It creates intimacy without identification. The companion stays slightly anonymous, which universalizes the experience without erasing it. And it implicates the reader, pulling them into the scene as both witness and companion. Suddenly it’s not just my wife beside me at the shrine. It could be anyone the reader has ever stood beside in a heavy moment.
I love writing in the second person. It’s a mode I return to naturally because it collapses the distance between writer, subject, and reader in a way that feels true to how I experience the world: not as a solitary observer, but always in relation to someone else.
