Line / Break with Victoria Chang

Interview Transcript

Laura (00:00): Hi everyone. I’m Laura Buccieri, the Director of Publicity at Copper Canyon Press. And I’m coming to you live from Brooklyn. You are watching our new interview series, Line / Break, which goes off the page and into the homes in the minds of our beloved poets. I’ve always really had the dream of seeing more poets represented on screen, talking shop, answering questions and kind of taking us behind the scenes of how they do what they do. And working with these poets at Copper Canyon has truly inspired me, very much challenged me. And it’s just been a ton of fun. So, in this series, I just wanted to bring that spirit to you wherever you might be. And each season we will be bringing you episodes from different Copper Canyon Press poets. In this episode, we are speaking with Victoria Chang. Victoria, thank you so much for being here. How’s your day going?

 

Victoria (00:55): Going well, thanks. Happy to be here.

 

Laura (00:58): Good. I’d love if you could introduce yourself, actually, I feel like you know more about you than I do, but name, maybe pronouns where you live, most recent book, anything else you want to throw in is fine with me.

 

Victoria (01:16): Yeah. Yeah. I’m Victoria Chang and I am a writer. I think of myself more as a creator like an artist. And I just like to make things is how I describe myself and I like to try and push boundaries of what’s possible. So I think that’s sort of how I describe what I like to do in general in life. Also, I live in the Los Angeles area on the west side, in the beach cities and let’s see pronouns, she, her, hers, and…

 

Laura (01:56): Book?

 

Victoria (01:57): Book? Latest book of poetry is Obit, that was published by Copper Canyon Press. And I also published a middle grade verse novel this year called Love Love with Sterling Publishing, which is an arm of Barnes and Noble.

 

Laura (02:13): That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, Obit, it was such a joy to work on that book with you. I love that book so much.

 

Victoria (02:24): Thank you.

 

Laura (02:25): Yeah. I’d love to just dive right in. I feel like I’ve read a lot of interviews or heard a lot of interviews that have kind of open with the question, like where did you get your start? What was your first job? How did you get here? Where was the beginning? But to me, when it comes to poetry, I’d kind of say everything can be tracked back to that first moment of inspiration, kind of that sense of seeing one’s self represented in a word, a phrase, a song something like that. So I kind of wanted to open with a similar, but different question in the sense of like, can you tell me kind of about the first time, if there was one, that you saw yourself represented or kind of the first time you felt seen in a show, in a book, in a film, a poem, a word, yeah. I’m kind of curious to start there almost.

 

Victoria (03:23): Yeah, I think that’s a great question because so much of what I’m working on now, this sort of book of hybrid essays and visual art is about being seen or not being seen how you see yourself, how others see you and about invisibility visibility, silence, knowledge, those kinds of things. So, yeah, I mean, I think, I think as a sort of a BIPOC writer and person, I think that being seen is a constant battle. And it’s interesting because we talked about it earlier today about invisibility and what does invisibility mean? It’s not like it’s good or bad. It’s always good or bad. I feel like being seen in certain contexts is a good thing. And then being seen in other contexts is a bad thing. And I’ve had to sort of in this new book that I’m working on reckoned with childhood traumas of being bullied, growing up and being seen very visibly and being tormented by some of the kids that I grew up with.

 

Victoria (04:32): And that was a bad kind of being seen. So, I felt very seen at a very young age, growing up in Michigan with very few sort of people of color. And so it was brutal growing up there and always wanted to be hiding. And so sort of like walking on a trip wire and not kind over of just a field of grenades and not wanting anyone to see me was very important growing up, but then also wanting to be seen, what became a later thing, which is like, “Hey, I’m here!” I’m not like, sort of all of those other people over there who seem to have all the power and all the control, but not knowing that that was not okay, is something that kind of came over time. It’s like now I watch shows that I grew up watching.

 

Victoria (05:22): I’m like, “Oh, wow. That show, that’s all white people.” And it’s like, or reading books, I’m like, “Oh, wait, most of the books I read were like by white men.” And like, these are things that may be intuitively kind of gradually I came to realize were not okay because that’s what happens when you grow up in the kind of the white supremacist cultural environment that we’re in. I mean, every institution is a white supremacist institution, including college. And our educational system, all growing up, and in television media, it’s all over all the time, and intuitively you know that it doesn’t feel fair or right, or diverse, but what power do you have? And so I think it’s been a journey for me as a human being and at the age that I’m at, finally, it’s like, I’m finally seeing myself in other things now, like for the very first time and I’m pretty old.

 

Victoria (06:25): And so even just reading books of essays lately, like Jaswinder Bolina’s Of Color, I was like, “Yeah! Yeah!” Like to actually have that experience where you can nod, or Sejal Shah’s book and we’re all so different we’re not even of the same ethnicity or background. Jaswinder and I have talked a lot about social economically, we are not at all similar, but it’s like to even to have that similarity of how people might have been bullied growing up was a brand new thing to the point where I’ve never talked about it before, and I’ve always been very ashamed of it. And now I’m starting to talk about it because I see other people are talking about it and essays and things like that too. And so I think, just now, I feel seen now, today, for the first time. Yeah.

 

Laura (07:16): God—

 

Victoria (07:17): This year, for sure. Yeah.

 

Laura (07:19): I mean, that’s wild though, to think of kind of growing up, not really being able to kind of see any type of mirror yet feeling, I assume, somewhat inspired to create, I mean, you, you deem yourself kind of a maker and a creator of writer, a poet. So how did you get inspired then if you weren’t? Because, for me, personally, I feel like when I first read like Ariana Reines’s Coeur de Lion, I was like, “Oh! That’s how language can function. I feel very connected with that”, and it kind of drew me into poetry via kind of her language. 

 

Laura (8:12): And so kind of what drew you in then? How did you find your way into writing then?

 

Victoria (08:20): Hmm. Yeah, I think, for me, I think I’ve always kind of thought in images and metaphor and I think that, and I actually think that I just have always been very visually oriented. And so I think in elementary school, when people are teaching you to write poems and they have those little contests and stuff, it’s like, that’s when I started to realize that there was this thing called a poem. And so that’s when I started kind of messing around and I think in high school having really great English teachers that pretty much taught the white canon, but still it’s like Emily Dickinson. Yeah. It’s like I had to memorize that stuff, “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves and”, and I still remember all those things.

 

Laura (09:14): They’re in you.

 

Victoria (09:15): They’re in you.

 

Victoria (09:15): Yeah. And so I think like that just sort of feeling a lot of angst and trauma and pain, but not knowing where those sources were coming from, led me to write. So now I’m writing a lot about intergenerational trauma and the trauma of my mother and things like that. And now I have a lot more awareness of sort of where a lot of those feelings and feeling of just feeling trapped and just suffocating and voicelessness and trauma, all just sort of came from… It came from my mom, probably, and my dad a little bit too, but also came from growing up where I grew up and feeling just really how difficult it was to be so different from everyone around you and to not even know how you’re supposed to be or who you’re supposed to be to just be utterly confused all the time. And I think that drew me to writing.

 

Laura (10:13): Oh, yeah. I mean, I can imagine that because, I mean, so much of writing is like that kind of asking the same question over and over and trying to get to that answer of that feels right. And so I feel like that that makes a lot of sense, but that’s a lot.

 

Victoria (10:35): It’s a lot. And then you start to fall in love with language too, and at some point then you start to realize you’re making art out of language and words, and then it becomes about art making. And I think a lot of people start writing out of trauma or out of traumatic experiences, identity making, who are you and why you have the right to speak and bringing out of voice out of silence, and trauma, I think is why a lot of people start writing, especially poetry. And I think it’s a beautiful thing. And then I think sort of like, as you grow as a writer then you start thinking about, “Oh, wait, there’s language. I can make beauty out of language and art.”

 

Victoria (11:20): And so then you start sort of expanding at your muscles, or to use a sports metaphor, you start sort of exercising all the muscles you might not have known that you have, because you won’t know you have them until you use them, because then they hurt and they’re sore. And so I think that’s how writing is, right? And I think you start to realize that you have so many things that you could use that you didn’t know that are beyond trauma, or maybe expressing trauma in different ways through language that you didn’t know when you first started.

 

Laura (11:58): Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. And so it seems like, at least from what you said, that you learned poetry from a really young age and you kind of started writing it from a pretty young age, but was there a tipping point in which you were like, “Oh, this is now something that I’m dedicated to, that I might try to really do and make some type of life around.” Was there like that tipping point or was poetry just kind of something that you kept coming back to and just kind of, I don’t know, it was always kind of around?

 

Victoria (12:37): Yeah. I mean, I think there are smaller tipping points really. And then there’s, for me, that a big tipping point, honestly, was when my mom passed away, I was suddenly given permission. I gave myself permission to focus more on poetry. I’m an immigrant’s kid and I’m supposed to make money and I’m supposed to be independent. My mom was quite the feminist I think my grandmother was as well, even though I don’t really know her, but it’s like you stand on your own two feet. You don’t rely on anyone else. You make sure you’re okay. That kind of stuff. So that was always my focus first. And I always kind of did poetry on the side. And so I do remember several tipping points. Like one, when I took an online, actually, it was an in-person class through the continuing studies program at Stanford.

 

Victoria (13:31): And Rick Barot was my teacher. That was life-changing. I mean, what a teacher and what a poet and what a person. And now I’m like really good friends with Rick, but that was seminal. Like that pretty much was the first important tipping point was like, “Wow, these poems that this person is bringing in and workshopping with him.” And then the second tipping point was like, he made me fall in love with poetry again. When I was taking classes in college, but he brought me back to it. And then I think the second tipping point, it was probably like a couple of years after I was like, “Wow, I think I really love this. I’m going to keep trying.” And I went to get a low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson. So that was another tipping point but then it’s like, I don’t know, life gets in the way really busy.

 

Victoria (14:21): It’s just not your priority. I was always sort of dabbling on the side and just doing the best I can; it’s like, there are too many things to do in one day. And I’m a little bit all over the place and not very focused as a person. And then my parents got sick when I was in my thirties and then all shit the fan. And then it was like more shit the fan. And it was like, then I was just… It’s just hard to find the time. And now I just make a commitment to writing. I make a commitment to living a writing life, and that means sacrificing a lot of other things, but I’ll write on the weekends, I’ll make time for it. But I mean, it’s never been a huge part of my life, but it’s always something I’ve returned to.

 

Victoria (15:06): It kind of doesn’t go away, right? I mean, I think a lot of poets are like, “God, I wish I didn’t like it so much. I wish I wasn’t drawn to it. There are many easier ways to live”, but it is like, there’s so many easier things to do. I mean, you can mindlessly watch so much television. Great television.

 

Laura (15:23): There’s so much out there.

 

Victoria (15:26): So much out there. I mean, you could go for walks and do all these amazing things, like way more, if you didn’t sit around and read and write all day but for whatever reason, it’s kind of like, whatever. It just drags me back in every time. And so I’ve stopped resisting it. I’ve just sort of embraced it, yeah.

 

Laura (15:44): Oh, I love that. I’m so happy you stopped resisting it because now we have all of your books, which are just so beautiful, but so I’m kind of curious then, I mean it seems…like you kind of to kind of make poetry part of your… To publish these books, to write these poems, to make time for poetry, to make it part of your life. And to now, now you’re a published author, you kind of… It’s a big part of your life. And I’m kind of curious, is it how you imagined it would be? Was there something like going into the writing life when you were like, kind of making this commitment, like, “Okay, I’m going to go for this”, like is it totally different than how you imagined it? Or did you even imagine it or were you just completely swept up in writing these poems that it just kind of took you where it did?

 

Victoria (16:51): Yeah. I mean, I think there are two jobs as a poet, really. One is to write and imagine and write and be creative. And the other is like that whole other hat. Which people talk about, which is like, I mean, I sometimes think about this. It’s like, “Well, I have books. What does that mean?” And I kind of [crosstalk 00:17:13] unpeel that onion, so that means, and I think about this with other people too. It’s like, so that means that you put together a manuscript. There are a lot of things that that means that you put binder clips on it likely if you printed it out at all. Maybe for those of us that are older, we used to print poems out and it’s like, maybe that means you submitted the poems, you put them into groups of five and you sent them out into the world, which means you did research on what journals might be good places for you to send poems, which means you read journals, which means you may have purchased journals, or you read them online.

 

Victoria (17:49): It just keep unpeeling it and unpeeling and unpeeling it, which means, and then going back to that core, which is, it means you wanted this, right? And so thinking about that and just sort of acknowledging that that is something that everyone goes through and thinking about what that means all the way back step-by-step and the things that you’ve done in retrospect is a very useful exercise, because I always tell students or people who are new to poetry it’s like, it’s always important to ask yourself why you started writing and why and what you wanted to do with your writing. And is the poem done if it’s not shared? These are all questions to answer yourself. And some people might say the poem is not complete, it is not a complete poem. It’s not fulfilled its own self as a poem, unless it’s been shared somehow. Now, that’s fine if you believe that, but then who do you share it with?

 

Victoria (18:47): And then how do you sort of ask those [crosstalk 00:18:49] questions of yourself? Is it your family? Is it your friend? Or is it on the internet through Instagram? Is it like, and I say internet as a joke sometimes because that makes me sound really old, but it’s like the worldwide web. Or is it like through a book form? Is it through chat book forum? Is it through a big publisher, a little publisher? Is it with a conventional publisher? Or is it kind of through an really indie press? How indie? So like just all those questions I think makes… I think a lot of times like just you know what your assumptions were just by looking at what you’ve done and what you buy into, what your belief systems are, what you value, the things that you think are important, your privilege, all of those things, just look at what people’s bio say, and it shows you what they value. And I’ve asked myself that question so many times, it’s like, “Oh, I just followed the path that I thought was I was supposed to follow.”

 

Victoria (19:58): And I think that’s very conventional and it’s very privileged. It’s very sort of, again, these white supremacist institutions that and processes that I’ve bought into. And I’m not sure how I feel about all of that, because, again, it’s like, I feel like in an ideal world, you just publish your poems and little pamphlets and just give them out for free. And like, why is poetry a product? And obviously I bought into that system because I’m with Copper Canyon one of the premier poetry publishers in America and that blah, blah, blah. I sent my poems into Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review I followed that path and I think, without thinking, and now I’m at this age, I’m doing a lot more thinking about what I believe in. And so, yeah.

 

Victoria (20:55): I mean, your question, is it what you’ve expected? I’ve never really put a lot of thought into it, to be honest. And I will say, I’m way busier than I thought. The more sort of conventional attention that you might get, as a writer, the more people want stuff from you. It’s a daily thing. Blurbs are a big thing that people want from you. They just want things from you. They want… I’m not even sure what they want from you. And it’s a privilege [crosstalk 00:21:23] to be asked. Yeah, I don’t know. And it’s like it’s a privilege to be asked. I know all of these things to be true, but yeah, I mean, I would say it’s a nice place to be, though, to feel like you’ve touched people through your work. And if I were to ask myself what I’ve always wanted, I’ve always wanted to share my work. I wanted to make things and share them.

 

Victoria (21:46): It’s really as simple as that. And unfortunately, the mechanisms in which we have to share them are really convoluted, have access issues are totally racist and sexist and misogynist and all the isms and are awful, awful in all ways. But in many ways, it’s like, well, I’ve been allowed to share my work with people. And I’ve really touched some people with my work, some people, and that’s great. So, it is, in many ways, it is, if I were to think about what I expected it would to be, and you can’t really know sort of how you’ll be received. So I haven’t ever put much thought to it. I never really think like, “Oh, I want to be this famous poet, or that thing”, it’s like whatever. I just, I know I want to write, I always want to write new things for myself and to challenge myself as a writer and to really, again, push the boundaries of what’s literature means and is, and I think I’ve always tried to do that. And if I’m doing that, I’m happy. So I would say I’m very happy right now.

 

Laura (22:53): No, I mean, I love that. I’m very happy because I get to read your books and what you said kind of about how you can’t control kind of how you’re perceived or how the poems are perceived. It is so true. You’re sending this book out into the world and complete strangers are reading this book, and sure, they could read a review. Sure, they could read your bio maybe, but at the end of the day, the poems are their own self and I think that’s a good thing. And I think that that’s a win. And so, yeah, and just getting poetry into the hands of people is always, that’s my life goal. So, that’s my job, so that’s finding readers.

 

Victoria (23:43): It’s a beautiful thing.

 

Laura (23:45): It is.

 

Victoria (23:46): Finding readers. Yeah. And the poem should live on its own. It’s like us as makers, we make stuff. And the ego is hopefully separate from that, as is the person. And so if the little poem can have its little legs and run into the world and touch someone, wow. It’s like, that’s so cool. That is just the coolest thing.

 

Laura (24:08): It is. It is. And I feel like, I mean, we could talk for hours about this and maybe someday we will, but I mean, we’ve talked about this so many times before about like how the poet as a brand, the book as a brand like marketing poetry as like basically this kind of package of here’s this brand like buy into this brand and it’s just so interesting as poetry, I feel like started as such an anti capitalistic kind of form. And now it’s getting read and people are buying it and suddenly there’s money. And it’s such a strange, strange phenomenon. But at the end of the day, I just, I do hope that the poems themselves find the readers and that’s my goal. Well, I don’t want to keep you too much longer, but I do want to ask if maybe you would read a poem, maybe one from your collection, or it doesn’t have to be from your collection, but a poem by you and maybe a poem by somebody that you’re reading?

 

Victoria (25:19): Okay. Let’s see. I will read. I’ll just open randomly. I’ll just pick, I mean, I open to page 64, so I’ll just read a poem on page 64. And I have no idea what, I don’t remember this poem, but I’m sure I’ll remember parts of it when I start reading, but it’s from obit and it’s in the shape of a little obituary and it’s called

Sadness 

 

Sadness-dies while the man across

the street trims the hedges and I can

see my children doing cartwheels. Or

in the moment I sit quietly and listen

to the sky, consider the helicopter or

the child’s hoarse breathing at night.

Time after a death changes shape, it

rolls slightly downhill as if it knows to

move itself forward without our help.

Because after a death, there’s no

moving on despite the people waving

us through the broken lights. There is

only a stone key that fits into one stone

lock. But the dead are holding the

key. And the stone is a boulder

in a stream. I wave my memories in, beat

them with a wooden spoon, just for a

moment to stop the senselessness of

time, the merriment, just for a moment

to feel the tinsel of death again, its dirty

bloody beak.

 

Laura (26:50): I love that.

 

Victoria (26:56): I don’t love that poem, but it’s fine. It was the one that…that appeared, so it’s okay.

 

Laura (27:02): Hey, I think, I could say many, many, many good things about this poem I have, but I’ll let you read another poem, perhaps. I guess it’s not going to be by you. Who is it by?

 

Victoria (27:19): Well, I just picked a book that’s sitting on my desk. It’s The God of Nothingness coming out by Mark Wunderlich, who’s a good friend of mine, and disclosure, and coming out with Graywolf Press January 12th. I mean, in poetry at some point you kind of know everyone.

 

Laura (27:34): No, it’s so true. So, many hats, like everybody wears so many hats. It’s insane.

 

Victoria (27:39): So many hats and you just know everyone. I mean, you’ve just been doing it long enough or you know of everyone, but Mark actually is a friend, January 12th, 2021. So I guess it’s coming out pretty soon, and I’ll just pick a poem that I’ve posted on my Twitter before it’s called “The Bats”. But yeah, the whole book is gorgeous. I mean, I’ve always thought Mark was a really, really, really good writer. And this book is beautiful like all of his poems and but yeah, this one’s called

The Bats

 

I share my house with a colony of bats.

They live in the roof peak,

enter through a gap.

 

At dusk they fly out, dip

into inverted arcs

to catch what flutters or stings,

 

what can only be hunted at night.

Sunlight stops their flight,

drives them into their hot chamber

 

to rest and nest, troll-faces

pinched shut. I hear them scratch.

In darkness, they chop and hazard through the sky,

 

around blue outlines of pines,

pitch up over the old Dutch house

we share. They scare some

 

but not me. I see them

for what they seem –

timid, wee, happy, or lucky,

 

pinned to the roof beams,

stitched up in their ammonia reek

and private as dreams.

 

Laura (29:09): Oh, thank you so much. That actually goes, I feel like with the poem that you read, “Sadness”, because I feel like that poem, your poem ended with like the bloody beaks or whatever. And now we’re talking about bats and like, so see everything works out. Everything works out.

 

Victoria (29:26): That’s right!

 

Laura (29:26): I love that.

 

Victoria (29:28): I love that attitude. Everything works out the way it works out. And you know.

 

Laura (29:33): Yeah. I mean, I forget. I don’t know if this is actually how the phrase goes, but I feel like my mom always used to say, “Man plans, God laughs.” And I feel like that’s like just everything is going on it’s path and…

 

Victoria (29:48): …surrender.

 

Laura (29:49): Yeah, exactly, exactly.

 

Victoria (29:51): Surrender. Yeah. Because it’s like 100 different things could have happened in one day and there’s not a wrong thing. I mean, yeah, if you get hit by a car and you die, that’s a wrong thing, but in many ways, that’s also your fate, and so there’s only so much you could do to control your life. And I think that, in poems too, it’s like just don’t control them. Just let them go where they go.

 

Laura (30:19): Just let be how they’re supposed to be. Yeah.

 

Victoria (30:21): That’s right.

 

Laura (30:22): And just make the next right choice. That’s what I try to do. What’s the next [crosstalk 00:30:26] right choice …that’s all you can do.

 

Victoria (30:28): That’s right. That’s right.

 

Laura (30:30): Well, thank you Victoria, for being such an amazing guest. Thank you everybody for watching, we will see you next time and do check out coppercanyonpress.org for all our other episodes and info about Victoria, about Obit, about Barbie Chang, her other book. And yeah. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Victoria. And we will—

 

Victoria (30:52): Thanks for having me.

 

Laura (30:53): See everybody next time. Thank you.

 

Victoria (30:55): Sounds good. Bye.

 

Laura (30:56): Bye.

 

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