Toronto, Canada
100 West 3rd Floor Writing Studio
Fiction writer Tom Cho works at the intersections of many genres, defying rigid categorizations of his work and the reader. Sometimes characterized as Asian-Australian fiction, queer fiction, or trans fiction (or all of these), his humor-filled, energetic, and stingingly self-aware prose probes complex questions surrounding the construction and expression of human identity, as seen in his collection of fictions Look Who’s Morphing.
Tom has also published over 70 pieces of fiction, spanning flash fiction to short stories in journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. He says that his writing practice involves being a collagist: he brings together seemingly disparate sources, including pop cultural figures (such as Godzilla and Fonzie from Happy Days) and scholarly works across disciplines. For his novel-in-progress, sources include philosophy of religion, musicals, and Star Wars.
Residency Focus
In the 100 West writing studio, Tom has been revising his novel-in-progress and writing the ending. Set in a robot future, Tom’s sophomore novel brings together robot-related tropes, such as the trope of giant robots, to explore questions about divine existence, religious diversity, and more. The book is written with the hope that our cultural ideas of religion can become less brittle if we find languages of belief that are capacious and pliable, as these concepts require. “To use slippery words to describe slippery concepts is a way to do justice,” says the author.