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chang's found interview

Each interview has been separated by a line and each Q is hyperlinked: Q1 is from Colorado State University; Q2 - Q4 are from FreeFall Magazine; Q5 is from Public Seminar; Q6 is from The Oxonian Review; Q7 - Q12 are from The Rumpus.

Q1. Do you think of philosophy and poetry as intimately related? Are there particular philosophers that you think of yourself as being in conversation with, or ones you are reading right now that are inspiring new work?

So many! I am a random philosophy person, meaning I haven’t studied it formally, but the kind of writing I seem to be interested in tends toward a philosophical way of thinking too... In terms of historical philosophers, again, I’m no philosophy expert, but I’m always interested in Wittgenstein, and there are a ton of poets who write very philosophical poetry such as Charles Wright, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Ashbery, and so many more. I used to think of myself as a writer who reads. Now I think of myself as a reader who writes.

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Q2. What drew you to the obit form?

It’s hard to say, really. The creative process is the biggest mystery of all. I think humans are infinitely creative and one of the unanswerable questions is where things come from, where ideas come from, where poems come from because I don’t think they come from a single place— they’re from a magical collision of millions of bits of experience. We have hundreds of ideas a day, maybe even more. Once in a while, we catch one in a basket and make something. And then the whole thing shatters, along with the basket and we’re left facing the void.

Q3. I sense a deep trust in your process. It seems that you allowed each obit to organically unfold so the real and surreal have no border just as grief is both real and surreal. Can you tell us about the roles of play and intuition in your work?

I am not a very top-down person by nature. I try hard to push out thoughts of hierarchy in my mind whenever they come. I try not to plan things unless I have to (for my job, for instance) and just go along with the flow of life. It can cause much consternation in my personal life and it probably hasn’t actually been very good for me in many ways, but to use a cliché, I feel like my life and the way my mind works is floating along on a river that has a lot of branches. I just go where it goes at the pace in which it goes, wherever, whenever, however. My life has had many twists and turns because of this. It is hard to pin down or explain. My writing process is no different. I suppose I don’t know how to be another way or how to write another way. On The Waves, I tote that book around sometimes and just open it to read a few lines here and there. The lyricism and mystery of the writing feels like traveling inside a cloud. Sometimes I’d open that book and pluck a word or phrase and try to use it in a poem in OBIT. I’m not sure why, but sometimes looking at words, any words, while writing, can help my own writing process. I think I am a visual learner, now that I think about.

Q4. To my mind the tankas placed throughout the book serve as breaks— fresh energy bursts as they balance the heavier weight of the obits. And with their focus on children—life at its freshest—they are also points of reprieve. How did tankas become part of the collection?

I had finished these obits and was revising them actively. At some point, I had this feeling that I didn’t know how to write anymore (does one really ever “know” how to write anyway?) I decided to write some formal poetry just to write something. I wrote sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, ghazals, and they were all dreadful and went into the trash bin. But my friend told me that the tankas were speaking to the OBIT manuscript and suggested that I spread them out in the manuscript so I did. I read my poems aloud and whenever I felt I needed a break as a reader, I slotted in the tankas. They seemed to want to be in pairs for some reason. Maybe they were too resisting loneliness, as grief is a very lonely existence.

Q5. What advice would you give young writers about how to write about their experiences of grief and loss, and also happy moments, without getting caught up in what audiences want?

It’s so hard not to get caught up in it. There’s so much envy and fear of missing out happening on social media. I always say, “Why did you start writing?” For many of us, writing is like breathing. It’s air. It’s as important as water and food. We do it because we have to, and some of us are just wired that way. People do other things because they need to: they run marathons, they make visual art, or they compose music. Everything doesn’t really have to be for an audience. I started journaling as a very young child and then writing poems and there was no one reading that stuff. And if we want to try and do more with it–have the poems published or find an audience–that’s a whole other story, and it’s difficult to navigate. If we mix all this up together, it can be really debilitating. So, just focus on the writing and try to make your writing the best that it can be at the time in your life.

Q6. In Dear Memory, you quote Valzyhna Mort as saying 'Lacking language is the beginning of a poem to me', which you have written resonates with your own creative process. How does the lack of language manifest itself on a page or within a finished poem?

I think that lacking language might be why we sometimes start writing but that doesn't mean what happens on the page or the finished poem accomplishes anything in the end. I think those interstitial spaces between the language is where the real poem is. Many people have said this before and I believe this every time I write because I always come out of writing thinking about how writing is failure, language fails, which might be why we keep trying.

Q7. In your acknowledgements, you mention that working as a poet is really isolating.

I think being a poet, period, is isolating, because it’s so marginalized in our culture. On top of that, I’m a female poet, which is another sub-segment of an already-marginalized art. And I’m an Asian American female poet, which is even more marginalized. I’ve always just liked writing poetry, but it’s much later that I’ve discovered that there’s this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club. And it’s based on art, whether people like your work or not, but it’s also based on a lot of other things—geography, who you happen to connect with and where they sit in that ladder—and all of that felt really isolating and disheartening to me when I figured it out. After all, I decided to ignore it and just work on the writing. But I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you’re sort of neither here nor there. Most of my writing friends are working in academia. Most of my business school friends are always talking about bringing companies public, and money, and making money, and lots and lots of money. It’s just a different environment. When I talk to either party, it’s always been hard to merge those two, so I never actually tried. I think this manifests itself as that feeling of isolation in all of my work. And this is the first book that it all comes together, because at the end of the day I realize, even though those populations are distinct and don’t like to come together, I think they’re not mutually exclusive. It took me awhile to not be ashamed to be a poet in the business environment, and to be a business person in the poet environment. I’ve always felt alone and isolated, and living on the West Coast, there’s no poetry community out here, and if there is, it’s really spread out—because it’s LA, it’s spread out. But I think e-mail and social media and all that has made me feel way less isolated than ever before. Facebook, Twitter, and all that stuff, which I’ve really enjoyed using. I think I’ve always felt very isolated, and I’m sure lots of poets do.

Q8. Where is the line between maintaining individuality and being a part of something larger than yourself?

I just didn’t want any order in anything. I have to leave an ordered life for them—the kids—and my job. I have to be at my desk at a certain time, and I have to answer e-mails within a certain time period. I have to get back to people and schedule phone calls. I have this much time with this CEO, or that. Everything is so ordered and organized. I love disarray. I love mess. I love surprise. I just wanted these poems to be who I really am, and what I really want. The only thing I have left that I feel can be really messy. Everyone always says that having kids is messy and sloppy. It’s true, but you as a parent have to try to bring some boundaries and control over that experience, or you’d have out-of-control kids. They have to go to school at 8:00. So you have to get up at 7:15, and there are all these schedules. There are a lot of responsibilities, which is true at the workplace as well. So I just wanted to be free, and so that’s what was really fun about all the language play, and letting the book be what it wanted to be, versus me trying to control it.

Q9. That reminds me of the Flaubert quote: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so you may be violent or original in your work.” So for you, then, are you saying you wish you could allow more mess in your life so that it fits into your writing, or do you think that this constant schedule- and boundary-setting also allows you to write this kind of work?

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I’ve worked in. Dana Gioia and I connected, and he said he hasn’t found anyone, either. But he was the head of the NEA for awhile, which is still an arts organization. My life in general, orderly or not, it allows me more freedom in my own writing. Sometimes I wonder, though—I have friends that sit around and just write all day. And I think it’s the coolest thing. Imagine that: while they’re writing, and thinking, and dreaming, I’m on the phone constantly, and working, and running around like a maniac, driving around, dropping kids off, picking kids up, washing faces, brushing teeth, fighting with them about sleeping at night, and this or that. I don’t get that time, at all. But I wonder if that kind of lifestyle makes me—for me—a different kind of writer. I know I wouldn’t have been able to write any of these kinds of poems if I didn’t lead the life I led. I wonder, though: what if I had gone to get a PhD. in literature, and went to work in academia? Would I even be able to write poems? Some of my friends say that academia can be very stifling on their writing. My gut was always that if I taught students poetry, I would give too much of myself to them and have nothing left. I feel like I give myself all day long to other people and other things, and I still seem like I have something to write once in awhile. Not often, though. I haven’t written anything since this book was written two years ago, short of editing those poems here and there. That’s a new thing for me, because I used to think, I have to write every day.

Q10. There’s a certain vulnerability in having writing published. I was just remembering before—we ended up talking about something else, but I laughed because you said when the McSweeney’s editors called and your first reaction was, They’re interested! Oh, no.

Exactly! See, you think you want something, and then you get it, and you think, I don’t know if you want this! Or you have mixed feelings about this. As a poet, I don’t sit around and say, “Oh, I want to write a book and get it published in the world.” Anymore. I used to, when I was younger, when my goal in life was just to publish a book. As I published books, I realized, that’s not really what I want. I don’t care about the books as much anymore. I just want to write poetry. This whole process of getting a book published is just part of the process. The last of the process that I enjoy the least, to be honest.

Q11. Would you decide to just stop publishing books, and publish individual poems?

Yes! Or not publish any poems at all. I don’t need to publish anything. I don’t need to write anything. I was telling the poetry editor at McSweeney’s that if I never wrote a poem again, and never published another book, I really could care less. That’s just the phase of life that I’m in. I realize so much that it doesn’t matter. Yet, I’ve spent my whole life trying to do all this. Now that I feel like I’ve done these books and stuff, it just doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I could be one of those candidates that drops off the poetry world, and you never see me again, and I wouldn’t mind. Or, I could come back and write something in two years, or ten years. I don’t want to think about it anymore, because I’ve spent my whole life thinking about stuff like that, and wanting so badly to have books out. I’ve also seen the whole poetry world—something I had no idea even existed. I’m not sure that I love being around that or in that. I love being part of poetry conversations. I love talking about what I’ve read. I regularly talk to poets, and it’s just like, “Have you read this?” Me, being as busy as I am, I’ve read a lot more than most of the people that I know, except for one of my really close friends reads way more than I do. But, in general, I find that poets spend a lot of time thinking about themselves, and not a lot of time thinking about other poets, or other poetry. Unless they think about how it affects them, or how it could impact them. I love when I meet generous poets, and generous meaning nice people, who give to the poetry community, who do interviews, read other people’s books, and talk about them, spread the…love, I guess. That means a lot to me. It’s surprising—you don’t meet a lot of people like that. For the most part, it’s a world of artists that are very in their own heads.

Q12. I’m still trying to figure out, now that I’m working more, how to fit in more writing and find that balance…like the rest of the world.

I think all poets, to some extent, feel that way. We just beat ourselves up when we don’t write. I don’t know that we have to beat ourselves up. The world doesn’t need another poem, clearly.