Aekta Khubchandani: Victoria, it’s such an honor to interview you! Your book, OBIT has been my bedside companion and left me teary-eyed. It’s such a joy to celebrate you and your poems. Thank you for taking the time. You’ve spoken about having an obsessive personality. What are your current obsessions? Do they include a television show, a song or a habit? 

Victoria Chang: Yes, I’m totally obsessive, but I think a lot of other writers probably are too. I am happy to report that I am currently not obsessing about anything in an unhealthy way. When I’m obsessing about creative things I’m working on every single day, I have this very strong desire to go back and work on whatever it is I’m working on, but I hardly have the time, so it can feel very frustrating. So then I work at all other strange hours and then get very exhausted. But I have a lot of energy, which is a good thing.

AK: I wanted to talk about your relationship to metaphor. I kept re-reading OBIT to hold your metaphors closer. They’re stunning! How do you weave them, and is there a process?  How do you call them into your poems?

VC: Other people have asked me about metaphors and I can’t really say this is coming from any conscious place. I don’t really think: “I’m going to write in a metaphor now,” but I think this is just how my mind works and I think a lot of poets are like this too. It’s the way many poets process the world, I think, visually.

AK: I’m thinking about your poems in the context of growth—that grief grows and even death, in some ways, is a kind of growth [of age, resilience and the physical self]. I experienced the book as a juxtaposition of burial and growth, and grief is the anchor that holds them both together. Does this juxtaposition stem from your identity of being a child of immigrants?

VC: I’m not sure, but I do know that being the child of immigrants has influenced all aspects of who I am, obviously, and my worldview, and probably how I make and view art. It’s hard for me to identify how the book stems from my experiences as a child of immigrants because I am just me, but I know my experiences permeate the book which is why sometimes the book may feel different to readers (and not unusual for me), meaning, I think our culture’s understanding of how other cultures may experience grief (and frankly, life) is probably pretty unsophisticated and lacking in nuance.

AK: You’ve spoken about writing in sequences, themes blending over different works. I’m so excited about your new book—Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, which comes out in October. You mentioned “... perhaps this book is the process of filling in what can never be filled in. Perhaps along the way, I also discovered that absence is a kind of presence too.” Can you talk more about this?

VC: I started writing OBIT in early 2016 and finished it in 2018 sometime. Just because I finished the book, though, doesn’t mean grief was finished with me. I started looking through my mother’s boxes in 2019 and as I found all of these old papers and archival materials, I began to realize how little I knew about my parent’s histories, as well as how much I missed hearing Mandarin. Every day, I’d make a new fascinating discovery about my parents by digging through these papers.

It felt like my entire heritage, which I didn’t know much about anyway, had vanished when my mother died. My mother and father were also pretty secretive and quiet about the past and anything that might be related to “feelings”. I grew up thinking feelings aren’t practical. Feelings won’t earn you an income. Feelings cannot combat racism. 

I started trying to fill in this void by digging into more and more boxes. At some point, I started writing these letters to my mother, which then somehow led to letters to everyone. I don’t know if that answers your question, but this thing started forming eventually, which became this book. And at some point, I started playing around with visual elements but the entire process of this book was painfully hard and challenged me creatively and artistically because I never thought about a book until way late in the process and by then it was too late to unravel the mess I had made.

AK: I’m curious to know from you, how much of your mother do you carry with you? And what of her has trickled into your language and expression? Especially now, after going  through your mother’s boxes while working on your nonfiction book.

VC: I carry my mother with me every single day. I miss her a lot and also miss what I was referring to before—my entire culture and heritage. I’ve wondered hard about why other people haven’t written so much about their dead mothers and I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am not only writing about my mother, but my lack of a history and what my mother represented to me. Now that she’s gone I have no one to try and make proud, and no identity.

AK: I keep going back to this line where you say, “If you look closely behind the poems, there are thousands of dried tears.” As poets and creators, it’s our natural instinct to be attached to our sadness. What do you think about writing from trauma and healing sharing space in poetry?

VC: I think everyone is different. I resisted writing from a true first-person experience for so long as a way of deflection—I was quite comfortable writing in various personas so I wouldn’t have to confront my true feelings, including sadness. 

As I’ve gotten older and experienced some pretty sad things (as humans tend to), I am more comfortable leaning into that sadness. I like to see if I can describe that sadness with language. It’s a fun, impossible task and the impossibility of it is something that I always enjoy. I’m always looking for an impossible challenge. Easy things never interest me much.

AK: I have a habit of re-reading a poem by its first and last lines. The journey of the poem changes a small degree when I do so. I loved navigating through the beginnings and endings of your poems. How did you go about writing the endings?

VC: I love endings of poems. I think the endings just come from the rest of the poem. I haven’t a clue what the poem is doing or where it will be going so it is fun for me to see where they end up. When I’m drafting, I try hard to write without thinking, meaning, I just let the poem go where it goes. Then, when I revise, I may work and rework endings. 

AK: I see an amalgam of political, cultural and personal self in the book. As a BIPOC writer myself, now in America, I question what all I can really say because there’s so much at stake. What does it take for you to be so vulnerable in your writing?

VC: I’ve said this before aloud and in interviews probably, but I really don’t think of anything being at risk when I write. My writing is not precious to me at all. It isn’t a delicate little flower that I need to nurture and water. I don’t think much about my writing at all while I’m writing. I happen to be writing in a particular space because of random factors such as where I’m living, what’s happening in the world, what I’ve read, etc. If any of those factors change, I might be writing something different. All of which to say, I don’t take any of it too seriously. I also don’t think too much about vulnerability anymore. At this age, I’ve seen enough not to really care too much about being vulnerable or not. And as I’ve said before in interviews, I’ve been invisible my entire life. And when visible, that’s not necessarily a good thing as a woman or a BIPOC. Because of this, I don’t put much thought to how others view me or don’t view me. The stakes are pretty low for me. I’m most interested in satisfying myself and enjoying the one life I have. I don’t want to waste anymore time worrying about the reader or the literary community. I offer you (if I’m able and lucky to) what I’ve recently made—you can like it or not. Either is okay with me.

AK: You once said that you read 10 books at a time, and they’re all quite diverse. What are you currently reading?

VC: At least 10. I have a lot of books surrounding my desk right now. I like to re-read things too. I’m re-reading a lot of Rilke because I’m taking Mark Wunderlich’s Rilke by Mail class. I’m also reading Doug Kearney’s Sho, Diane Seuss’s Frank Sonnets, Anis Mojgani’s In the Pockets of Small Gods, Amy Gerstler’s Index of Women, Edward Hirsch’s 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. And I love reading anthologies so I have two near me right now, Joy Harjo’s Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and Kevin Young’s African American Poetry ... and a lot of older poems I re-read all the time or read for the first time. I have some old Simic around me that I’ve been re-visiting because a few poet friends were talking about Simic. I have a lot of journals lying around, latest issues of LARB, Michigan Quarterly Review, NER, etc.

September, 2021