Interview with Victoria Chang

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize for OBIT (Copper Canyon Press). The book has around 70 obits, plus sonnets and tankas. It illustrates how death encompasses much more than the absence of a body. How grief expands as well as contracts. Can you tell us a bit about the journey behind this book?

Victoria Chang: The book came out much like other books and poems, but in this case, I was actively resisting writing elegies because I didn’t feel like I could contribute anything more to the vast library of wonderful elegies throughout history. I also didn’t feel like my experience with grief fit the traditional elegy form. And I didn’t want to debase my mother’s death or my own grief by writing about it. But, one day I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the documentary “Obit” and I went home and wrote 70 of these obituaries in two weeks.

CG: The poems are visually compelling. The obits resemble coffins or headstones. Tankas, urns or flowers. And the loose sonnets in the middle section float as they connect. What drew you to the obit form?

VC: 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.

CG: I was curious about the ordering of the obits. Did you write them in the order they appear? If not, what was the process like putting the obits in order?

VC: The first poem (I looked it up) that I wrote was “The Bees … ” and it ended up in the back of the book. Putting together a book is different from writing. As I was writing, I certainly didn’t think that I was writing poems or anything I might share. I just felt like I was creating, making something out of my own grief, finding a way out of it. Putting a book together came much later and for me, at least, usually involves laying the poems out on the floor and grabbing whatever catches my eye, forming some kind of arc.

CG: Grief is an entity, a force, as if the unknown is calling to you “the way grief needs oxygen.” The obits explore the bones and body of grief. Can you talk about this energy? What has writing about grief taught you? Did you learn, through your engagement with language, new things about grief while writing this book?

VC: I wasn’t even sure what grief was because I had never really experienced this kind of grief before. And I’ve since thought longer and harder about why I felt a kind of grief that flattened me and a whole other book came out of that: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief which is coming out later this year. I think that when my mother died, my whole history, her whole history, our collective history evaporated. Because she was so secretive, I knew very little about her past which was also my own past. I learn while writing, which isn’t much different than learning to live while living. No one knows how to do this thing called life. In many ways, we’re all learning live, while being watched by everyone. It’s a strange thing, being alive. Knowing this, I don’t know why we aren’t more generous with each other.

CG: I appreciate your engagement with play and intuition. How it directs and guides you. 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. The Waves by Virginia Woolf was also part of your process. Can you tell us about the roles of play and intuition in your work?

VC: 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 cliche, 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. I get very bored listening to people. I love reading subtitles while watching Korean dramas or Chinese dramas, even when I understand what they are saying.

CG: 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?

VC: 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.

CG: It’s an arresting cover. Your image with an obit multiplied. By writing about death, did you feel you were also facing it? Perhaps this might relate to the line: ‘Death isn’t the enemy, knowledge of death is the enemy.’ Did you begin to see death in new ways after writing OBIT?

VC: I didn’t make the cover or give any input, which is exactly how I like it. I’m very aesthetically driven but I’m not a designer so I like people to do their jobs without my influence, not even a word. I just tell people to please please make it beautiful as an object. That’s my only prompt. Phil Kovacevich was the cover designer (and he did my other book too—Barbie Chang). The cover was a bit scary to me because I am superstitious (I’ve carried a lucky jade fish that my mother gave me, around in my purse my whole life), but everyone at Copper Canyon Press seemed to like that cover so I trusted them. On interpretation, you’d have to ask Phil why he designed it the way he did but I think he did a great job.

CG: What’s next for Victoria Chang?

VC: I have a new book of prose/hybrid writing and art coming out this fall from Milkweed Editions (Dear Memory) and there’s some neophyte visual art in there as well. I also finished a book of poems that is coming out next spring from Copper Canyon (The Trees Witness Everything). I don’t write regularly at all because I’m simply too busy to do so. I started writing OBIT in 2016 and finished in 2018. So since 2019, I’ve written a lot (for me, at least). I’m a little tired of that constant angsty mindset that I live in while I write and revise so it will be nice to take a break from that. I’m actually dreaming of taking a proper vacation which I think will be at the end of the year, early next year.