This post is the eleventh 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 Chen Chen, Ángel García, and Bayo Ojikutu, authors of the first three chapbooks in the Craft Chaps series. Their books are free to download from the Craft Chaps website.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Bloodaxe Books has just released a UK edition. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently You MUST Use the Word Smoothie (Sundress Publications, 2019) and Gesundheit! (with Sam Herschel Wein from Glass Poetry Press, 2019).
Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, was born in Texas and raised in Southern California. He is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, winner of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2018. Currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Nebraksa, Lincoln, Ángel has had work published in the American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Connotation Press, Tinderbox, Huizache, Miramar, The Packinghouse Review, and The Good Men Project among others.
Bayo Ojikutu is the author of the novels Free Burning and 47th Street Black, winner of the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Contest. He currently teaches in the department of English at DePaul University. Professor Ojikutu was born and raised in Chicago, where he still lives.
Ruth Joffre: What were the first craft books you engaged with in a meaningful way? How did they shape your understanding of what craft books can or should do?
Chen Chen: Wow, this question—I’m realizing that it was years before I encountered a single craft book by an author of color (Coin of the Realm by Carl Phillips). There still aren’t very many. There need to be many more. I’m thrilled and honored to be a part of this roundtable discussion, which features craft chapbooks by writers of color. Wow. Here are two of the first craft books that were/are meaningful to me:
Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance—excellent introduction to rhythm, meter, music, the line. I so appreciate Oliver’s precise definitions, concrete examples, and real tools here.
Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates—gorgeous close readings of poems and ultimately a meditation on poetry’s role for both the individual and culture. I love the ways in which Hirshfield connects the smallest moments in a poem to the largest possibilities and mysteries of being on the earth.
Ángel García: The summer I turned eighteen or nineteen years old I was working for an Upward Bound program. I was a teaching assistant in a Creative Writing class in which the instructor assigned Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. At that point, I had already been writing for a few years—chicken scratch poems I kept in a large sketchpad and kept hidden from most people—and I had taken several poetry workshops at Long Beach City College. Still, my frame of reference was limited and my reading of poetry even more so. What I remember most about Kowit’s book was that it was accessible. As a young poet, that was important to me. While I had brilliant and very talented instructors, the book never made me feel like I knew too little (though that was clearly the case). This was also reflected in my own work. Poems for me were about people, certain kinds of people, capturing their pain and suffering as well as my own. Kowit’s book, more importantly, made me realize the endless possibilities of approaching my own work. This is what I needed as a young poet: something that spoke to me in terms I understood and exercises and prompts that allowed me to explore various themes and forms. While I have read a handful of craft books since, as an instructor now I still look for those qualities in a craft book. Something that opens rather than closes the diverse approaches to both process and craft.
Bayo Ojikutu: Janet Burroway’s classic Writing Fiction caught my attention during postgraduate studies, as it provides language and context for considering the aesthetic as the scientific in a diverse workshop setting. At first blush, this might seem an onerous and potentially soul-wrenching proposition. For one drawn to these dust-strewn considerations of canonized aesthetics, though? I was facing my first creative writing teaching assignment with two dozen underclassmen at a fine Midwestern U.S. business-and-teaching institution during the years immediately after Y2K and 9/11. We were post-irony and all of that; dense gravity, subversive wit, and Marxist deconstruction were all declared dead.
Burroway’s work was an anecdote packaged in textbook binding. Her Writing Fiction provided a language in which I could discuss prose fiction with young students new to cultural dissonance as expressive muse or to creative writing in craft workshop settings altogether. Its text exercises and critical questions were a platform for meeting students who were coming to prose study from experiences outside the humanities, not to mention beyond the discipline. Her work offered a context suited to various sensibilities, yet no less rigorous and serious than Kundera’s, Forster’s, or Gardner’s. Meanwhile, the text’s seventh edition introduced me to Chitra Divakaruni’s short story “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter.” For that, I am immensely grateful.
RJ: When you were first approached about contributing to the Craft Chaps series, did you know what kind of craft book you wanted to write? How did you decide on the form and subject matter?
CC: I thought I was going to write about Asian American poetics and humor. I’d touched upon this topic during the qualifying exams for my PhD. So, I thought the Craft Chaps series would be the perfect opportunity to expand and refine my thinking on this topic that’s very dear and personal to me. As it turned out, I quickly felt overwhelmed by this idea—and I just couldn’t imagine doing it justice in a chapbook-length exploration (not that it can’t be done! I just felt daunted and unready).
Then I remembered I’d been sharing all these prompts on Twitter, writing prompts. The response to these had been wonderful. They were sparking some fun conversations. Some people asked about a craft book, a resource with all these prompts. And this project felt like an invigorating challenge, rather than a paralyzing one. There’s a craft point or writing practice point to be extrapolated from that last sentence: yes, push yourself, but go toward a difficulty that opens things up, rather than shuts them down. This craft chapbook ended up being such a blast to work on. I’d never written anything like it before and I wasn’t sure if it would “work.” At the same time, it felt like writing a poem, which is the best feeling in the world.
As the prompts accrued and began to converse with one another, I realized that I wanted the chapbook as a whole to speak to the whole, living selves of poets—craft as what’s on the page and craft as everything before/around the page, everything within the poet and the poet’s world. What you had for breakfast. What you’d like to have for an afternoon snack. How your best friend is doing. Why that tree reminds you of someone who is no longer here. The words you might think are “unpoetic” and yet absolutely belong in the poem you’re writing right now.
Eventually I’ll return to the topic of Asian American poetics and humor. I don’t believe you can ever be 100% ready to write something (to me, that means you already know exactly what you’re going to write, and where’s the fun or challenge in that?), but I do believe in letting things absorb nutrients and influences at their own pace, letting things sprout when they need to show their faces.
AG: It took me quite a while to figure out what element of craft I was going to write about for the essay. I suppose the hesitation stemmed from (while I consider myself to be very meticulous about craft) my sometimes unconscious relationship with craft. While working on my first collection, Teeth Never Sleep, I was wholeheartedly invested in the execution of the persona poem. Like countless other poets, I wrote, revised, wrote new, and revised again to satisfy a certain obsession I had with a particular voice. But rarely did I tell myself, I am writing a persona poem; it became more about the voice, the essence, rather than an element of craft. And I suppose that is what makes craft a slippery thing. I think, though this might be too simplistic a categorization, that craft falls into two categories 1) forms and 2) essences. The former relies heavily on the guidelines, the constraints of what makes form, form. The sonnet, the villanelle, the pantoum, etc. all come with certain expectations and rules, if you will. Though those have been and continue to be “broken” or played with, there is a recognizable element that identifies them with a certain form. The latter, a category I am very interested, gives the poet much more liberty. And because for a second manuscript I am working on, erasure has become an obsession of mine precisely because (while there are expectations) the process is much looser. It invites play. It invites invention. It invites imagination. While form certainly does this too, I don’t necessarily want to be reminded around every corner of the constraints, and instead, am much more interested in bending or breaking those. I am always interested in reaching into the recesses and loosely discovering what is around me. Similarly, while my essay “Meditations on Erasure” is about an element of craft, I didn’t want to be didactic or prescriptive. Rather, I wanted to be able to talk about my process of discovery, what led me to erasure and the ideas of erasure. So really, again, this stemmed from an unconscious obsession that is personal and familial. Most of my history, by either loss or lack of “evidence,” evades me. It has been, intentionally or unintentionally, erased. The essay, much like the project I am working on, is an amalgam.
BO: Many years back, I cooked up a set of exercises/definitions when faced with instructing a workshop of unknown students at one institution/program/studio or another at which I was teaching for the first time. Over the years, I have shared these improvisations, craft considerations and exercises in various settings: with friends, peers, and potential employers, etc. When the wonderful Amy Sayre Baptista presented the Sundress Publications opportunity, I took the chapbook as an occasion to circulate further, in a credible medium, with sourcing intact.
RJ: What elements of craft are you studying or investigating now, post publication of your chapbooks?
CC: Increasingly, I’m thinking about associative leaps. How leaps happen, can happen. Strange turns—how can these get stranger? Maybe Winona Ryder’s Joyce from Stranger Things knows (though Season 3’s magnets falling off the fridge seem less strange than Season 1’s communicating with son through Christmas lights, just saying). I’m also thinking about sentences, syntax, the way a sentence structure or pattern can allow for leaping, turning, strangering.
AG: I am still very much obsessed with erasure at the moment. But since I have also been working through family “archives” I have been thinking a lot about ekphrasis. While I haven’t done much with them, I am tightly holding onto a few photos of my great-grandfather and a few postcards my great-grandfather sent to his mother and my grandmother when she was a child. There are only a few, much of them without any context other than the pictures on the postcards, so I am trying to make sense of them or discover the essence of what they might have meant to the recipients and, generations later, what they mean to me. I also have old family photos that I have been looking at. Photos of my mother and father, before they met each other, and family photos taken before I was born. Because I am trying to piece together a larger narrative about my family, across geography and generations, I feel these photos are important to the manuscript, but they have yet to reveal how. Undoubtedly, both these forms (erasure and ekphrasis) represent a loss. Those narratives of family, of strength, of vulnerability, of pain and love, for countless reasons, are simply gone. And while I’m trying to discover and create a larger, cohesive narrative to be put together by looking at photos and making sense of them, this process is difficult because it speaks to the ghosts of ancestors and my allegiance to them (though clearly I never met them). There is, in this process a sense of responsibility that frightens me. Ultimately though, what I might fear even more is that that story, that narrative, however long and hard I piecemeal it together, might still represents a loss and in a very personal way, maybe this means something about me too: that what I am in search of is wholeness, and that I might never, despite these attempts, feel whole.
BO: The democratization of creative writing witnessed over the course of my life (particularly on the age and gender fronts) informs the broad expansion of this aesthetic discipline within the academy. Beyond the tower, too. Part and parcel to this apparent pluralism has been the emergence of craft as an objective study; somewhat ironically, the pragmatic nuts and bolts of creative work has taken the forefront in the “positioning” of creative writing within both the humanities and in our writers’ circles. While acknowledging the immeasurable advantages to an expansive and inclusive polity of writers, my struggle is to find ways to kindle and stir the means by which good writers channel magic and muse. To never lose appreciation for the essential and the unknown in our work and, in the workshop/classroom, to privilege distinct (and unique) voices to address the world, beyond themselves.
RJ: What has been the single most important object of obsession in your career? Note that in this context the singular “object” can incorporate many pieces, such as a television series, a poetry collection, or an album.
CC: What a fabulous question. TV has definitely been a major influence and obsession in my writing life, in my life in general, and I’d have to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains the most important series for the development of my imagination and voice, especially as an adolescent. I mean, the wacky mashup of genres—horror, comedy, romance, action, family drama, surrealist play—continues to be a part of how I think and work. The mix of tones and styles of speech, the way the conversational has such a wide range.
That said, as an adult, I recognize the problematic aspects of the series, too—particularly when it comes to race and to a very 90s, very white sort of feminism. I’m interested in how, as a queer Asian American growing up in the 90s, I often had to dig for or, really, invent representation in TV shows. Like, seeing myself in the character of Willow, a nerdy white girl who eventually embraces her love for another nerdy white girl. Or, relating to Buffy when she has to hide being a Slayer from most people, including, for a while, her mother.
These days, I’m also interested in TV and movies that focus on queer characters of color. Pose immediately comes to mind. And Moonlight. And Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, which came out in 1997. I think I did first watch it in high school…but it’s taken me a while to fully appreciate its complexity, the depiction of two Chinese men falling in and out of love/obsession, in and out of codependent dysfunction, all while navigating an unfamiliar new life in Argentina. My friend Muriel Leung wrote a stunning essay, “Stranger,” which references/inhabits the aching tango scenes from Happy Together.
AG: The thing I have always been obsessed with is narrative, or good storytelling. As a child who loved to read, I got my hands on as many books as possible, when possible, and loved the idea of being able to enter or create other worlds. However, because my parents endured a lot of trauma during their childhoods, it was always difficult to get my parents to tell stories about their past. This currently has become my obsession. I find myself trying to piece together a larger narrative about my family, where we come from and how we came to be in the U.S. Silence can be its own form of trauma, and so much of what I do and write is an attempt to understand that silence, as well as counter that silence by creating narratives.
BO: The closest things to obsessions making hay with my work are an aesthetic form, a discipline, and a genre of music: film, history, and jazz are my sources of inspiration and light in prose. Primarily Anglo-American and continental European cinema of the 20th Century, world history and its consequences from circa 1200, and anything in the jazz crates, from swing to Afrobeats.
RJ: Finally, what are you reading and writing now?
CC: I just finished reading my friend and pressmate Jan-Henry Gray’s wonderful first book, Documents. These poems draw on/pulse through experiences of being a queer, undocumented Filipino American. The collection is so surprising and moving. I pretty much read the whole thing on an Amtrak from New York City back to Boston. It felt right to be in motion, in transit, while reading Documents. I love how hybrid in form this book is—it’s making me reconsider what the prose poem can do, and how an essay can reside in a poetry collection.
I’m working on some final edits for a chapbook I put together with my friend Sam Herschel Wein; it’s called Gesundheit! and is forthcoming from Glass Poetry. The chapbook explores and celebrates queer friendship, queer love, queer forms of family. And I’m slowly working on my second full-length collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. Among other questions, this book asks: What happens when the people or the institutions one relies upon—that one calls upon in times of crisis—are themselves undergoing calamity? The book also contains, I think, some of my funniest work.
AG: Right now, I am working on Comprehensive Exams, so my reading list consists of 20th Century women poets, from H.D. to C.D. Wright. I am focusing on Anne Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones, Wanda Coleman’s Mad Dog Black Lady, and Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Emplumada. In terms of my writing, I’m working on a new manuscript concerned with genealogy and geography, familial history of migration and immigration, with a focus on both erasure and ekphrasis.
BO: I recently completed my third novel, Best Hope—short portions of which have been excerpted in several venues—and I am reading John Sayles’ novel A Moment in the Sun.