We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Abigail Savitch-Lew a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Abigail, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Since 2014, I’ve been writing—and rewriting—a novel titled Livonia Chow Mein. Simon & Schuster acquired the manuscript in 2024, and it will be published in the spring of 2026. I’m so excited to share this baby with the world!

Livonia Chow Mein is a multigenerational, multiethnic novel set in Brownsville, Brooklyn. It follows a restaurant-owning Chinese American family and its relationship with the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. When I began writing this book a decade ago, I was interested in fictionalizing and embellishing my family’s stories; my paternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. during the era of Chinese Exclusion, and they ran a Cantonese restaurant in Brownsville from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Yet the more I read about Brownsville, the more I knew I couldn’t write about the neighborhood without doing justice to its incredible history. This necessitated several years of research and oral history work focused on the Jewish and Black communities that called Brownsville home in the 20th century. As I continued to write the novel, I shifted away from the facts of my family’s story, instead seeking to tell a more expansive tale about the relationships between these three peoples.

With this novel, I strive to wrestle with anti-Blackness in Chinese and Jewish communities. I also hope to honor Brooklyn’s long history of transformational social movements, including the contemporary movements to advance reparations for Black Americans and to decommodify land.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a writer of fiction and non-fiction prose, and a third generation Brooklynite of Jewish and Chinese descent. Some of my favorite authors include Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, James McBride, William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy. I’ve studied creative writing on both the undergraduate and graduate level, and in 2019, I was an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow. I also worked as a staff reporter for the nonprofit news outlet City Limits, where I covered former Mayor Bill De Blasio’s housing plan.

My fiction often grapples with racism, xenophobia, gentrification and environmental degradation. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1990s in an interracial, interclass family and environment, I was exposed to inequality at an early age, and I turned to prose to interrogate systemic inequities and wrestle with the complexities of human nature. Over the years, I’ve received a lot of pushback in writing workshops for how directly I engage with politics—and ultimately, that pushback has been good for me, and has made me a better writer. I’ve learned how to eschew excessive didacticism, and how to incorporate historical context into my fiction without it becoming burdensome, clunky, and a disservice to the world of the story.

My journalistic tendencies may beg the question: why not just stick to non-fiction? But fiction offers so many additional tools! By switching perspectives or point of view, by playing with structure and diction, we allow a reader to sink into the shoes of a stranger and to discover empathy for someone they thought they could never know. In addition, real life has too many digressions; the arc of a good story is far more captivating and instructional. Fiction distills reality into its deepest truths.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Fund universal basic income, universal healthcare, and a universal right to housing. The main reason I do not write more—and write better—is because I have to prioritize keeping a roof over my family’s head, paying medical bills, and keeping our stomachs full. The billionaires who own this country have convinced many Americans that programs to meet people’s basic necessities are “socialist.” I’m all for socialism if it means giving working class people the little we need to speak freely, create freely, and take care of each other.

Our society must stop adhering to the myth that only certain people are born creative, and the rest of us are meant to consume. That’s a capitalist notion, not a fact of human nature, and it’s a notion that produces toxic celebrities and conformist masses, that generates “creative hubs” alongside neglected, atrophying towns and ghettos. A healthy society nurtures the innate creativity in all its members. What our schools teach, how our economy works, and even our concept of “artist” must change.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I guess it took some resilience to stick with this book for ten years.

From 2014 through 2018, I worked as a reporter while writing Livonia Chow Mein on the side. I left my job in 2018 when I had a full manuscript, and I thought that I could edit for a year while living off my savings, then send the manuscript to agents. I imagined selling the book immediately, a quick rise to fame, even a second book by the time I was thirty.

I worked hard on the revisions, spending all day editing at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch. Yet within about nine months, I had run out of savings. I moved back in with my parents for a time, and for extra cash, I took on a freelance research contract. Bad decision: I had political disagreements with my supervisors, and the project took 13 painful months to complete.

My mental health began to deteriorate. In 2019, I spent many hours crying on my bedroom floor, wracked with anxiety, beating myself up for mistakes, and mourning my grandmother’s death. Livonia had come to a standstill; I sent it to an experienced writer hoping for feedback. Then the pandemic hit, and I suffered a flare up of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—something I’d struggled with since my preteen years.

When the writer’s email finally arrived in May, 2020, I was crestfallen. Make no mistake; the writer had been sympathetic, thorough and generous, but still, by the time I reached the ninth paragraph of his letter, I knew my book was still in no shape to publish. This was perhaps the lowest moment for me. After six years of working on one novel, after spending all my savings and abandoning a possible career in journalism, I felt I had nothing to show.

But I was too stubborn to give up. Instead, I accepted the writer’s feedback and spent the pandemic rewriting more than half the book. I survived that rewrite because I had a mother, father, and aunt who continued to take me in no matter what; because I found a lover who accepted me as I was; and because I enrolled in an MFA program that was free, inclusive of POC writers, and full of astute professors and peers who believed in my project and understood how to improve it.

Resilience means having enough confidence in your own worth to ask for help. It means having the humility to fail again and again, for as long as it takes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://abigailsavitchlew.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abigailsavitchlew/