Hi!

Thanks for checking out That’s a lot of pep talks, a monthly-ish newsletter from me, Ash Huang. In an age where our creativity is under constant onslaught, we have to stick together to make it through—and to keep making things.

I believe in our collective power, and that art is an invaluable connector between people. I believe it is our human right to remain artistic, and that creativity is an illuminating, irreplaceable way for us to make meaning of our existence, even if it is occasionally painful.

About Ash

Ash Huang is a writer, artist, and designer. She has been published in Nightmare, Lightspeed, Ecotone, Apparition Literary, Orion’s Belt, Alien Magazine, Catapult, Fast Company, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won the Diverse Worlds Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation, and is an alum of the Roots. Wounds. Words. Retreat, Tin House Winter Workshop, and the Periplus Fellowship. She was a Reading Fellow for the Tin House Workshop in 2024–2025. She is currently a Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler Resident with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Her speculative fiction examines themes such as inherited and intergenerational stories, nostalgia and misremembering, our complicated relationship with social media and technology, her particular slice of Chinese America, and diasporic co-creation. She has also written essays on motherhood, equity in tech and design, as well as creativity and maintaining a creative practice.