This post is the fourth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and the ways it is used in the classroom today, among other things. This week’s interview is with Neil Aitken and Dao Strom, founders of De-Canon, a literary arts project, pop-up library, web resource, and more.
Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, Babbage’s Dream (Sundress 2017) and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga 2008), which won the Philip Levine Prize. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, creator of Have Book Will Travel (a web resource for authors and reading series), and host of The Lit Fantastic, a podcast about authors and their obsessions.
Dao Strom is a founding member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of women artists and writers of the Vietnamese diaspora and the editor of diaCRITICS. She makes music as The Sea & The Mother and is the author of five books/works: a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, accompanied by a song-cycle, East/West (Press Otherwise, 2015); a collection of novellas, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006); and a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 2003).
Ruth Joffre: When did you first become aware of the literary “canon”? What was your initial reaction to its primarily white and male sensibility?
Dao Strom: Having been educated in the West, I believe I absorbed the implicit tenets of the “western canon” before I was aware there could be any alternative. I would say I lived with this as reality for years—well into my young adulthood. I had absorbed, as well accepted, both the discrepancy and injustices of it—that there were not representations of voices or bodies like my own—as “it’s just the way things are”, and perhaps I believed (even if only unconsciously) in a method of subversion (i.e. my ability to adapt to the western forms and transpose my stories into that form) before I realized that one could transform, not just subvert, forms entirely, to better reflect the kind of writing that would better speak for and to people like myself. So the realization, for me, was not so much that the “canon” was white and male, but that I was not those things and would not find myself in them; that I would not be permitted entry, in truth. A paperback copy of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (given to me in fact by a white woman high school English teacher, which I then carried around until I was 26 before reading it), was perhaps one of the first encounters I had with an Asian American voice that broke through to me.
RJ: When did De-Canon first take shape in your minds? How did you go about building it—intellectually, financially, physically?
Dao Strom & Neil Aitken: De-Canon might not have come about if not for the climate of both Portland’s very particular, sometimes seemingly benign (yet insidiously weighted) brand of racism, and the anxieties of the 2016 political climate. I think both Neil and I and others in our circle were feeling both exhaustion and frustration at the blind whiteness of activities around us—curations, events, expectations, tokenism of being the only brown person in a reading lineup, etc. We conceived of De-Canon at first as a resource hub for writers who were also teachers and for aspiring writers of color; this seemed of need especially in light of experiences we heard and read about, from young writers facing racial and social challenges of (some) MFA program environments. I think Claudia Rankine addressed these issues quite eloquently in her AWP 2017 keynote address. Somewhere amid our conversations, the *dream* of a library devoted to books by writers of color arose—how could we create the center we wished to be gather around, and would feel ourselves properly represented by? We want to emphasize, though, that our intention was not solely to defy the western canon or posit a binarily “alternative” canon, as we also did not want to define our efforts solely in response/resistance to the dominant force (thereby reinforcing those power dynamics). It was not just a matter of white vs. non-white content, either. In the very word “de-canon” we wanted to challenge that impulse toward rigidity and parameters and the setting of hierarchical “standards” that underlies the very meaning of the word “canon.”
So, the spirit of De-Canon was really meant to be much more elusive, undefining at the same time as (re)defining, truly a questioning of parameters and who gets to decide, more so than another authoritative bid at simply curating a list of books by authors of color; we wanted to resist placing ourselves in claims of authority. To address these concerns, we built into the project a crowd-sourcing/community-oriented aspect: we solicited (and still solicit) suggestions for books from other writers and readers. We also conceived of a very non-hierarchical, idiosyncratic, physical arrangement for the books—the “book boxes” are of all different sizes, there is no alphabetizing or indexing involved (books are physically placed into these shelves according to individual whimsy), and the book boxes can be stacked and arranged in many formations, probably different each time the library moves. We hope this visually suggests the “multi-storied”-ness of “de-canonizing” that is really at the heart of this project.
As for financially and physically launching the project: we launched in August 2017 with the support of a Precipice Fund grant, facilitated through PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art), with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation. Our second installation in 2018 was supported by an APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) Place-Making Grant; APANO is a cultural advocacy nonprofit serving East Portland communities. Our project would not have been possible without the help of these grants that support artist-led social engagement projects.
RJ: You describe De-Canon as a “living canon”—a community-sourced, of-the-moment resource that destabilizes the very idea of a canon. How do you envision this living canon growing and evolving over time?
DS & NA: We hope to continue adding books to our inventory and for our list of books to continue to reflect the contemporary, or “living” canon, at the same time it also preserves connection to books by authors of the past, living and no longer. We are aware this canon could be like a web, ever-growing, ever-expanding, and we are open to new influences and perspectives coming in to inform it. But also aware it will take more than our own two minds to source/curate/maintain this “living” web of a canon. So, our hope is for this to grow as a collective project, with more voices and ideas than our own to carry it forward.
RJ: One of the many resources De-Canon offers is an archive of writers of color writing on craft. You call this an “invisible archive” because of its pointed absence from most MFA curricula and from larger discussions of craft within the literary community. In your opinion, what steps should the community take to make craft more diverse and inclusive? What can individual writers do to make this archive more visible?
DS & NA: Writers of color write and create about so many things—their stories are so much more than just their passage to this country or their traumas as minorities, refugees, immigrants, as descendants of slaves or other marginalized communities, etc. I think as writers of color many of us eventually become tired of being defined by our lesser-ness in this society, or by our most apparent cultural attributes and passages, or by being representative of Other in the western canon. However, at the same time, we are aware those histories inform our stories. So these are tensions to navigate as writers of color that are not always talked about in, say, the typical MFA settings. Our wish is that De-Canon can be part of a conversation that enlarges the perspective on what writers of color have to say and create, and how they may do so; we want the opportunity of witnessing, and in whatever small way contributing to, a larger dialogue that engages the many nuances of thought that we know writers of color—of so many diverse experiences—are already engaging in. If we can create and/or find forums to share these thoughts with one another, our idealistic belief is that we will also impact the aesthetic and contextual dialogues about American literature at large.
So, maybe the simple answer is: we hope writers of color will keep writing and thinking and voicing, at large and especially to one another, and thus deepen dialogues about “canon” and literature in America, and increase understanding of the nuances, in both content and form, that are being engaged by writers of color.
RJ: What have you learned from founding De-Canon? What are some of the personal highlights from your experience?
DS & NA: Perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned from founding De-Canon is just how much of a hunger and need there has been for this type of archive and the conversations and partnerships it creates. When we assembled the first installation, we had originally envisioned that this would be a single one-off exhibition that would host a number of readings and events, then at the close of the month simply fold up and disappear. In fact, the original plan was to dismantle the collection and distribute the books to local writers of color as seeds to build their own collections and libraries. What happened instead was that during that one month installation, we heard and observed attendees say over and over that they had never been in a room with so many books by writers of color, that they had never seen their own voices, faces, and experiences reflected back to them on this scale. Some were even moved to tears and begged us not to dismantle the collection, but to find some way of continuing the project. It was very clear that this project was serving a very real need in our community and so we set out to find a way to extend it. I think I’d always had a sense of the importance of what we were doing, but the fully reality of the type of impact such a collection could have hadn’t sunk in until that moment. I suspect that for many of us, such a want has always been there, but has persisted invisibly and unnamed. We don’t know what we’re missing until we find ourselves immersed in what we’ve never had.
NA: There have been so many great moments and experiences over the past few years of De-Canon’s existence. I think some of my favorite memories revolve around readings and events that have taken place in the current space this past year. As the venue for several AWP events, we had the pleasure of hosting the Team Mashalla reading (Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Fatimah Asghar, Safia Elhillo, and Angel Nafis), which brought in a standing room only crowd that filled not only the library space but part of the adjoining theater space. We had been told to expect 70 people, but over 220 people showed up. There was such an incredible feeling of love and joy in that room—the room buzzed with energy, fire, and inspiration, and I heard many in the audience comment afterward that they’d never in all their time at AWP had such a powerful experience at a reading. Another highpoint was watching our bibliography of texts by writers of color discussing craft and our directory of graduate creative writing programs with faculty of color go viral on Twitter and Facebook. It was heartening to see the response to these two research projects—and to hear how these resources were helping shape course syllabi and better inform faculty and prospective students about what was happening in graduate programs across the country.
RJ: De-Canon has been (and continues to be) many things: a pop-up library, a web resource, an AWP offsite event organizer, a community space offering workshops and events. What’s next for De-Canon?
DS & NA: De-Canon’s library aspect is currently, and for the indefinite time being (at least the next year), installed at a community space, Milepost 5, in East Portland. While we oversaw coordination of events in the De-Canon space ourselves up until 2019, this year we handed off event space management to APANO, a nonprofit organization that does a lot of community work in East Portland. The truth is, handling a physical community event space, alongside everything else we were trying to do, stretched us pretty thin; although of course it has been wonderful and galvanizing to witness the events that have taken place in the space. As it happens, one of us (Neil) is currently dealing with U.S. immigration issues and has returned to Canada, so moving forward De-Canon will also shift focus—we will put our energies toward developing the web resource aspect, while considering other future paths. The physical library will continue to be presented as a social practice/art installation, housed within the APANO event spaces, for the time being. We’d love people to be aware that the De-Canon library is open to the public to visit between 2-5 most weekdays and is a very cozy space for co-working or a quiet afternoon of reading. (Books are not lendable; the collection is available only as a reading library at present.)
As mentioned earlier, we were thrilled to host a number of AWP offsite events at the De-Canon library during AWP 2019. In addition to the very well-attended Team Mashallah reading, we also hosted a Kundiman-sponsored reading of Asian American poets with new books, a reading of West Coast API writers sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), and an event for Las Musas, a collective of Latinx YA lit authors. It was exciting to see and hear these authors in an environment that wouldn’t exist without their voices and experiences — and to see how their work was inspiring and moving an audience of local and out-of-state readers and writers, many of whom had never been inside the space before.
Since our initial conception of De-Canon was as a temporal and indefinable project, we feel it true to that initial impulse for us to also adapt as the needs of the project change, and to now contemplate, moving forward, how the project might develop in virtual, or other, spaces. For instance, we would happily invite others to curate their own “de-canon” libraries in their communities, utilizing our list of books and our installation model. There is also the potential for other “pop-up library” versions of De-Canon to be curated (by us) in other locations, if circumstances were right for it.
True to its name, De-Canon is resisting canonization, is one way we are looking at it. The tenets of not becoming too fixed or rigid, for our list of books to continue evolving, and for the boundaries of this project to remain porous, are still on our minds—and, with the project’s two facilitators now located in different geographies, we feel we have to keep open to where the currents pull this project next.
RJ: What projects are you working on right now?
DS: I am presently at work on a literary multimedia project, Postwar Tablefruit, with the support of a Creative Capital Artist Award, and which is still very much in-progress and so still quite elusive for me to try to describe. My other work includes editing for diaCRITICS, an arts and culture blog of the Vietnamese diaspora, and guiding a collective project of Vietnamese women writers and artists, She Who Has No Master(s); both are projects of DVAN.org (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network). I also have a book of novella-length stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, being reissued (with new introduction and preface content) in November 2019 by Counterpoint Press.
NA: I’m working on a variety of projects, including Have Book Will Travel, an online resource and directory that helps connect authors and reading series. I’m also editing a new (somewhat overdue) issue of Boxcar Poetry Review, which I hope to publish shortly, and will be continuing on remotely as the book and craft fair curator for the East Portland Arts and Literary Festival. Outside of these administrative projects, I’m currently working with composer Juhi Bansal on The Enchantress of Numbers, a short opera about Ada Lovelace, and trying to put work together for a third book of poetry.