Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Immigrants In Our Own Land, published in 1979, the same year Baca was released from prison. Other poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007).  In 2015, his retrospective collection Singing At the Gates was published and features over four decades of Baca’s work. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, and the International Hispanic Heritage Award. He was awarded the 2006 Cornelius P. Turner Award for his memoir A Place to Stand, which has inspired a new documentary and educational initiative. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others.

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The first time I saw the name Jimmy Santiago Baca was in 1991, on the pink title page of a film script that read: Blood In. Blood Out. Screenplay by Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Directed by Academy Award winner Taylor Hackford (aka Helen Mirren’s husband), much of the film was shot on location in San Quentin. It was scheduled for release in the spring of ’92—that is, until the Los Angeles riots broke out. A scared studio, uncomfortable with gang and Mexican mafia themes, renamed it Bound By Honor and watched it tank at the box office. But Baca’s powerful work, based on his own life experiences, rose to unexpected heights. It went viral long before there was social media, sinking deep into the cultural consciousness of the Chicano community, while resonating with diverse audiences across the country and the globe. It enjoys cult classic status to this day.

In 2013, it was another film project that led me to discover Jimmy Santiago Baca, the poet. Daniel Glick, a young filmmaker was producing a documentary version of Baca’s award-winning memoir, A Place to Stand. A trailer for the film begins with prison images and supers that read: In 1973, Jimmy Santiago Baca was sentenced to Arizona State Prison. He was sentenced to a life without meaning or hope. Until he created his own.

Baca was 21 when he entered prison, sentenced to over five years on drug related charges. Abandoned by his parents, he had already spent much of his life living on the street, and was functionally illiterate. Against all odds, and in defiance of a prison board that rejected his request for education, Baca taught himself to read and write. He sent poems to respected literary journals, got them published, and began a dialogue with the world from his cell. His first chapbook was released before he was.

A few years ago, inspired by Baca’s memoir and poetry, I arranged for a conversation* between Baca and my husband, Carlos Carrasco, the actor who played Blood In Blood Out’s quintessential bad guy, Popeye. Carlos asked Jimmy to recount his journey into writing. The specific question was: “How did you do it?”  It wasn’t the first time Baca had been asked this question, and it wouldn’t be the last.

As I prepared for this Lunch Ticket interview, I thought about asking, “How did you do it?” yet again, but Baca’s original response, transcribed below, captures it all:

Jimmy Santiago Baca: Generally speaking, when someone speaks about how did you come into this craft?—they’re speaking institutional or systematic approaches. ‘Well my mom took me to my first poetry reading,’ or ‘my father got me signed up at Sarah Lawrence College for poetry classes’ or ‘my girlfriend gave me this book.’ Americans in a great many ways are spoiled. So if you ask a man who cannot read or write in a prison cell in Chile and you give him some charcoal and he doesn’t know how to write and he knows that he will die tomorrow—he’s under the duress of dying tomorrow—he will phonetically make out his sounds on the wall: Love. I Love you my daughter—However that might be spelled on the wall … it will be done. And people will say:

—How did you learn how to do that? I mean you only had a day?

—Well, I was going to die tomorrow and I had to send out a note to somebody that I loved them.

Like black people have soul or Europeans have the muse, Spanish people have duende—it’s that place that transforms you from a body being into a spiritual being.

In other words, the time frame is not adjudicated by pampering. It’s adjudicated by this will be my last time to speak. So how did I learn grammar in the space of three months from not knowing anything about English?—Except functional words like: Stop. Go. Food. Love. Hate. I couldn’t really understand putting together a sentence. How did I get that? I got it because of necessity.  I was involved in situations where I was going to kill somebody and somebody was going to kill me. I don’t know how I got myself caught up in that. The second I stepped in the prison somebody tried to stab me I stabbed back. Next thing I know, there’s a death warrant for me and I wanted to tell my grandmother I love you but I don’t know how to write:

—I will learn how to tell you I love you by tomorrow noon. I will learn how to do this.

And I took the book and I took the dictionary and I looked at it and there was nothing between me and that—there was no world, there was no house, there was no payment—there was only [the dictionary and the book} and me. And combined [that] created a third principle of god and with that kind of triangle—any thing is possible. Anything. Anything. This idea that “how did you do it?” is basically saying that we are so pampered that it takes us four years to learn that. How did you do it? That is such a pampered question.

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This past February, I caught up with Baca by phone and, over the course of a few days, he took time from his writing and other responsibilities to answer questions about his past and provide perspective on all of our futures.

Rochelle Newman-Carrasco: You learned to read and write in prison and that’s also where you found poetry. What do you consider your earliest influences? When do you first remember hearing poetry?

I was four years old and there was a certain balance to the water, to the weather, to the seasons, there was a certain balance to everything that gave me a sort of lyrical harmony … that was poetry. There was a sense that there was a divine balance in things.

JSB: The first reference I can remember, I guess I have to go all the way back to nature because, in nature, I responded immediately to the harmony. I instinctively understood that everything was in balance. I was living with my grandmother when I was four years old and there was a certain balance to the water, to the weather, to the seasons, there was a certain balance to everything that gave me a sort of lyrical harmony … that was poetry. There was a sense that there was a divine balance in things. I kind of knew that and participated in it, very, very early. I was blown away—by the waters, by the snows, and the wind. The wind had a certain charm to it. It had a certain voice and I would listen to the wind almost every single day on the prairie. It had a beautiful voice that spoke to me. If you contrast that to the sounds that came from my extended family—my aunts and uncles and such. Their sounds, of course, were—if they were drinking and fighting and stuff—their sounds were violent sounds. And I was very aware of those sounds. I was very aware of the sounds of sorrow. I was aware of the sounds of misery.

Then, of course, there was my grandmother. I would go to church with my grandmother when I was four and there was this beautiful sound of the bell in Mass, the sound of all these old people praying together in unison. […] The sounds in church mixed with the sounds in nature without forcing one upon the other, they sort of blended and merged into this chorus of divine welcome. I felt extremely welcome in those sounds when I was a child. Then there were also the sounds of silence. The sounds of silence were overwhelming. We spent long days that extended into weeks and extended into months and I became extremely familiar and intimate with silence. And silence had a sweet voice to it—it accommodated the leaves on trees, it accommodated the dust, it accommodated the dogs barking. Silence was this extraordinary piece of paper on which the world wrote its songs.

Then of course I went from there to the orphanage, and the orphanage had an orchestra of sounds that also blended into the sort of music that got me intoxicated. We had the choir that I sang in. We had the beautiful music of cows out in the fields. […] Everything seemed to have music to it when I was young….

RNC: Did you access that music in prison – was it stored in you?

JSB: Oh yeah—definitely the memories recalibrated themselves to become resources for me while I was in confinement. I knew love and I knew what friendship was and I knew what health was, through the ways that silence offered its music to me. I knew the world through its music, and its music was not fabricated in studios where musicians cut their albums, but more—it was the music of everyday common life. It was the music of animals and the music of nature—and I very much heard it and I metabolized it and it became part of my bodily organs. The music became a cellular package that I carried with me in my body as I grew.

RNC: You started reading poets like Byron and Coolidge in prison. In your memoir, A Place to Stand, you wrote about stealing your first book from someone, almost out of spite.

JSB: [The poetry books] belonged to the desk clerk. She was going to college. That was one of her classes. Once I got a grasp of grammar, I went searching for books. There were books laying everywhere, all over inside these prison cells in county jails. I got books wherever I could find them.

RNC: I won’t ask you how you did it, but I do want to understand what you think drives a person like you, maybe someone in prison today. Is the drive to read and write a primal urge?

JSB: You have to have a reason. People who become eloquent—there’s a drive behind their eloquence, there’s a reason behind it. And a lot of kids grow up to learn language and to learn grammar without having any experience built in them that gives them a reason to express themselves. Almost immediately, once you get out of pre-school, when you’re in 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th [grades] in school, there’s a big emphasis on reading books to kids. That happens, and kids are so interested in [books] because they want to use language to explore their experience. But at some point during your time in school, experience is diminished to mean nothing and soon language becomes an instrument—so that you can use it to get yourself a good job. You can use language to get yourself an A-plus. You can use language so that you can hide your secrets.

Nature taught me how to use language to balance myself.

In its orchestra of sounds there was such harmony and balance I guess I picked that up and I learned how to balance my sorrows with my joy. I learned how to balance my fear with my fearlessness. I learned how to balance my solitude with my silence. Language became an incredible tool for me to deal with balancing my world in a very, very imbalanced society.

You can use language so that you don’t express yourself—and people begin to use language for all the wrong reasons. They use language so they can close down their personal experience and [close down] expressing their dreams and their sorrows and their hurts and their disappointments. They begin to use language to cover up and conceal all those emotions—so it becomes aborted—so language doesn’t really have a drive in it anymore. Just like a tool, like a wrench or a screwdriver. When you use it, you’re using it for a purpose. […] Language is used to delineate logical occurrences during your day, but it’s no longer sacred. It’s no longer used to express your divine sentiments, your talking with God, your feelings that are embedded deep in your bones, that are going to help you spiritually find a place in the world that gives you balance. I think the language of nature came to me very early on and people keep asking me how did you do it? How did you do it? And I guess my response to that was that nature taught me how to use language to balance myself. In its orchestra of sounds there was such harmony and balance I guess I picked that up and I learned how to balance my sorrows with my joy. I learned how to balance my fear with my fearlessness. I learned how to balance my solitude with my silence. Language became an incredible tool for me to deal with balancing my world in a very, very imbalanced society.

RNC: You’re a world traveler. Is there a difference between the way poetry, or the poet, is valued in the U.S. versus in other countries?

JSB: It’s really simple. In America we value possessions. In other parts of the world they value experience. And experience translates into stories. People all over the world still value their stories. In America we value possessions. We would much rather talk about a new car than talk about a story that happened between grandfather and me. We’d much rather get on the computer and play video games and enact some cataclysmic epic than to talk about the epics in our own lives. People cling to their old traditions in other countries. They place a lot more value on their stories than we do in this country. […] Reading poetry in other countries is part of every day life. Reading poetry in America is only at the university level and in the classroom. It’s not part of life. It’s part of the lesson plan. Students really excel when they take poetry out of the classroom and apply it to their lives—they really excel when they have answers taken from poetry books to their problems. They become richer people, much richer and they’re a lot nicer to be around, you just want to be around them when you have somebody that can solve some dilemma that you’re experiencing by referring to a poem—poetry has a way of speaking to you that’s directly connected to your deepest recesses in your heart and in your memory, and those are very valuable places that we inhabit specifically to make us human beings. So the question to really ask is: When will you become a human being again? How long will it take you after school to become a human being? When did you leave your human beingness behind? What grade did you stop becoming a human being?

RNC: What about Latino poets? Does culture impact craft?

JSB: Chicano people in particular have a gift called “corazon”—they have this thing called corazon and it’s extremely hard to define. It’s like it would be kind of difficult to define “black soul”—like black people have soul or Europeans have the muse, Spanish people have duende—it’s that place that transforms you from a body being into a spiritual being. I think that Chicano people are more apt and readily prepared to understand and experience poetry. I think they’re more willing to cross that line of fear because fear comes to different people in different ways. There are as many fears, types of fears, textures of fears, as there are snowflakes. And I think that Chicano people in particular have never given away their corazon. They’ve never given away that beautiful lesson that they’ve been given. […] All of our experience is imbued with a certain poetic essence and I think we come born prepared to embrace that poetic essence.

RNC: Writers of color engaged in MFA programs and other learning scenarios are often subjected to microagressions and other non-productive styles of communication and feedback from students and teachers. How do you believe this can be addressed?

JSB: Teachers have to be trained. They don’t have enough training in the make up of what America is and they’re taught to fear anything that’s different. Their knowledge is so limited to the book, and most books don’t embrace the experience of people of color.  That becomes a real problem, because when a teacher comes in and teaches a group of kids to open their hearts up to their own lives and their own experiences and to learn to express what they have been fearful of expressing before—I mean when you create a classroom, you’re supposed to create a classroom where it becomes a community of people who trust each other, not tease each other, not jeer at each other, not mock each other, not make fun of each other, as is the case today. If some kid in a classroom today gets a failing grade, the rest of the students will look down on that particular student and make fun of that student as being stupid or dumb. When, in fact, that kid has to go home and there’s no food at home, his mother’s shooting up meth, his father’s doing heroin and drinking alcohol. There are some very serious problems and what we are basically teaching the students in class is you just have to stop caring about those kids and move on—and the teacher is the one who fosters that sort of indifference.

What we have to do is get teachers to foster empathy and through empathy we can open experiences that have not heretofore been allowed in the classroom. […] Enlightenment is what we need—young, brave teachers who are enlightened. So many teachers are coming to the classroom so ill prepared it has basically destroyed the educational system—because students don’t want to become robots. They inherently want to take what’s good about them and develop it into something they can contribute to society—and that’s the very thing that ill prepared teachers close down. […]

Enlightenment is what we need — young, brave teachers who are enlightened.

So many teachers are coming to the classroom so ill prepared it has basically destroyed the educational system—because students don’t want to become robots. They inherently want to take what’s good about them and develop it into something they can contribute to society—and that’s the very thing that ill prepared teachers close down.

As it is today, when you have a teacher walk into a classroom, her job, his job is to throw the student out of her own story—eject the student out of their own narrative—and that’s to say: your particular experience does not matter. What matters is that we all pass this test together and we move on to the next grade. But you have to pass the test. So, I’m going to have to throw you out of your story, because your story is insignificant compared to the story I’m about to tell you. The story of your success means you have to get A’s, you have to graduate, you have to go to college, you have to become somebody without ethics or morality and join some business, some institution where your experience still is not needed. So consequently what happens is we grow a population of people who are only really educated in taking orders from their bosses. They’ll do anything they have to do in order to please the boss because it is the same thing as pleasing the teacher. You won’t be betrayed if you do a good job of it. You’ll be praised, and you’ll go to any expense to get that praise. If that means creating a Holocaust situation where guards don’t question their superiors: ‘… are you seriously going to kill these people? And you want me to go ahead and do this?’ And they say yes. That’s exactly the kind of person they cultivated in Germany. The kind of student they cultivated in Germany was one who only took orders and obeyed them. And today, no matter where you look in society, you hear the same replay over and over and over …. No matter where you go that there’s inequity you hear, “I’m only doing my job,” and that’s to say: I’m only doing what my superiors tell me to do—and that’s learned early in the classroom.

RNC: What does success look like for Jimmy Santiago Baca?

JSB: The success I think I have is that my kids are capable of loving, and capable of having great confidence and self esteem, and they’re capable of empathy and compassion—that’s success as a father.

We go to these infinitesimally small altars and we pray before the spark and we hope to carry that spark in the fiercest storms and keep it lit. And that’s really what the poet’s journey is—it’s to keep the spark lit. Carry it like an Olympic torch.

Success as a writer is that I have purposely gone out of my way to shy away from letting these major celebrity machines take over and package me as something to the country that I’m not. What’s happened is that, when I say no to something, most of the people around me say you made a terrible mistake saying no: saying no to being on national TV, saying no to being on National Public Radio, saying no to all these major media outlets that could really send my name out into the world and up book sales by hundreds of thousands. They say you’re not taking advantage of the media and the power that they have. And I say, no. Maybe I made a mistake, but maybe I didn’t. I’m just not going that way. I have faith in people’s word of mouth— they read a book and they tell someone else about it—and as of this date, not one of my books has gone out of print.  All 26 books, or however many I have, they all continue to be published,[…] more and more people talk about them, more and more teachers. It’s taken an awful long time for teachers to come around, but it seems like teachers are really getting it now. A Place to Stand is in the top 50 memoirs and biographies—it’s above Whitman, it’s above Angela’s Ashes. It’s one of the best selling memoirs in the U.S. for the last two years now. It inspired an award winning documentary that just got released nationally. But it took time for the teachers to get it. The way the machine runs, it’s their job not only to promote certain writers but also to exclude others. If they want to get someone that’s more palatable to the populist they’ll get someone like Solzhenitsyn,[…] or some imprisoned writer in China and say, look they imprisoned this writer in Russia or in China. […] Accept it to say that we have writers in America that should be read. But they’re not, because we don’t want to admit that we put political writers in prison. It’s a whole other ball game and the publishers are not quite ready to engage.

RNC: Is there a path to poetry, let’s say a path for aspiring poets today?

JSB: The path to poetry has always been the same. You simply wash away all the clutter in your life, just wash it all away and get down [to business]. Poetry is all about the basics of breathing and eating, loving, being trustworthy. It’s all about the same basic things that happened to people two million years ago or whenever. It’s all about the creative spark that has to exist between you and your own God, you and your own mind, and between you and other people. It has to be about your nurturing that creative spark in you and keeping it going and then from there it will take you on your own unique journey.

It’s not about the awards and the accolades and the ten best books of the year. It’s not about exoticizing—everybody wants to make this exotic—Oh, so and so’s in Italy today and Oh, so and so is translating a new book. It has nothing to do with that and it has everything to do with honoring and nurturing the spark that inhabits words. We go to these infinitesimally small altars and we pray before the spark and we hope to carry that spark in the fiercest storms and keep it lit. And that’s really what the poet’s journey is—it’s to keep the spark lit. Carry it like an Olympic torch. Except, you’re not going to carry it to these big events. You’re going to carry it to the smallest, smallest, smallest occurrences in your life—and there it will illuminate some secret truth that’s so necessary for people to enjoy life—and it seems like almost everything that we encounter on a daily basis takes away from that spark.

*For the entire conversation between Jimmy Santiago Baca and Carlos Carrasco, click here.

Born on a small island near Puerto Rico called Manhattan, Rochelle credits her Lower East Side roots with her love of culture, humor, and language. She lives in Los Angeles, has over three decades of U.S. Hispanic marketing experience, and is a recent Antioch MFA graduate. She holds a BFA in theatre from UC Irvine. Her work has appeared in Lilith Magazine, Role Reboot, haikuniverse, NAILED, Advertising Age, and Lunch Ticket.

Folks are never going to just change their mind about something because you tell them they should. They are going to change their mind because they feel a stake in it. Art is a tremendous way to create that kind of stake because it enables you to enter the experience of another person and see the world through their eyes. – Nina Revoyr

Nina Revoyr was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Polish-American father. She grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles, and attended Yale University. She received her MFA from Cornell University and is the author of five novels. Her first two, The Necessary Hunger and Southland, are set in urban, inner-city Los Angeles, and the third, The Age of Dreaming, is set in Little Tokyo and Hollywood during the silent film era. Her fourth novel, Wingshooters, takes place in rural Wisconsin during the 1970s. Lost Canyon, her latest novel, follows four diverse urbanites from various Los Angeles neighborhoods into the mountains of the Sierras. The weekend adventure turns into a challenge of survival as her protagonists come face to face, not only with the forces of nature, but also with unexpected human encounters fraught with prejudice, avarice, and the territorial desperation of drug trafficking. Lost Canyon’s high-energy adventure encompasses the inspiring beauty and raw ugliness of both natural and urban landscapes, while subtly considering the complexity of such contemporary issues as intolerance, ethics, and social diversity.

Ms. Revoyr is the Executive Vice President and CEO of Children’s Institute, Inc., a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that serves children and families affected by poverty, violence, and trauma. The Children’s Institute is currently raising funds for the new Watts Children Center, a multi-service facility designed by LA architect Frank Gehry. The new facility, described as “a beacon of hope in the surrounding landscape,” is slated to open in 2019.

Revoyr graciously spent over an hour with me via Skype one evening in March 2016, discussing her latest novels, the writing life, social activism, and the importance of art.

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Carrie Kellerby: Much of Lost Canyon seems to be culled directly from your personal experience in your community, your work at the Children’s Institute, and the cultural challenges you see every day. But Lost Canyon is not the first book you’ve written that addresses subjects like racial and economic diversity. In fact, all your books deal with difficult social issues. Would you talk about how you make the connections between your life, your work, and your writing?

Nina Revoyr: The things I care about, the things that are preoccupations, the things that drive me in both my work and my writing are similar, but I tend not to write directly about my actual job because while it’s important and interesting to me, it is mostly administrative. It’s just not compelling enough to be the fodder of good fiction. In fact, I think it’s been good for me to have separate existences. They are definitely connected, but they emerge through very different processes. The novels, for example, deal with things indirectly. I’m not one of these authors, like the police officer or the attorney, who comes home from work and writes crime fiction.  It’s also different than teaching. I have taught, and I love teaching, but it makes writing the job too. The pressure on academic writers, particularly for those who are in tenure track positions, is intense. I think I would find that difficult. I also think the separation between what I do for a living and my writing allows me to keep reading as pleasure as well. And I think that’s important for me. Reading is still a way I can step into another world and lose myself in something other than the everyday world. Some of my academic friends talk about looking forward to a time when reading can once again be a pleasure for them. So I feel fortunate because my job allows reading and writing to remain a joy.

It was important for me to show that the environment that someone works or lives in has an effect in shaping them. So you have these characters that come from very diverse backgrounds, different genders and different races, and they all have this collection of different life experiences, which leads them to read situations a certain way and also leads people to respond to them a certain way. They all make assumptions about each other.

CK: To get away from the pressures of their respective environments, the four main characters of your novel go on an extended weekend hike into the Sierras. They don’t really know each other, but they all work out at the same athletic club, and their physical trainer Tracy organizes the excursion. But rather than get away from it all, it’s almost as if they bring the urban environment and all the complexity of social interaction with them. They continue to operate, on the trip and when they reach their destination, from their urban experience. What does this say about cultural assumptions?

NR: Well, it says that we make them. And that those assumptions, the kind of shorthand way we have of thinking about things or people, is not ultimately useful, or not complete, in terms of understanding who people are. Each of the main characters in the book comes from a different part of Los Angeles. Several of them come from places that you don’t normally read about in a loving way—not in fiction anyway—and not in a way that shows the complexity and beauty of the environment as well as the challenge. It was important for me to show that the environment that someone works or lives in has an effect in shaping them. So you have these characters that come from very diverse backgrounds, different genders and different races, and they all have this collection of different life experiences, which leads them to read situations a certain way and also leads people to respond to them a certain way. They all make assumptions about each other. With Lost Canyon I got to take some of the social and racial dynamics of Los Angeles, which of course, mirrors the social and racial dynamics of our country, and create a little microcosm. They have to figure out a way to work with each other, [to] depend on each other, to trust each other and get past those assumptions about one another for the sake of their own survival.

CK: And they do, for the most part. It’s faulty, but they do. Take Gwen, for example. She makes missteps, but her transformations are pretty compelling. The book is written from three different perspectives, Gwen’s, Oscar’s, and Todd’s. Gwen’s trajectory was, I think, the most dramatic to watch. She ends up defying the assumptions made about her by the others. She also has clear ethical lines that, even under stress, she won’t cross. Yet, they do all end up working together in their own ways. How did you see Gwen develop as a character in the novel?

NR: Gwen grows in so many ways, and she really became the heart of the book. She’s the one who has her assumptions about her own limitations. She thinks she can’t carry a backpack, and she’s not comfortable in herself or in her body. And all the folks she’s going with pretty much think the same thing about her. Someone even expresses the thought that she’s the weakest link.  She even has that doubt herself. So what happens for her over the course of the novel, through danger and hardship, is that she transforms and gains strength and confidence. It was fun to get to see her blossom like that. And yes, she does draw those ethical lines, but her adherence puts them in danger. She doesn’t want to take certain kinds of actions, whereas, some of the other characters are more inclined to take things in their own hands. However, her ethical choice not to take things to logical extremes, and the fact [that] she gets the others to go along with her, means that some other trouble befalls them.

The kind of shorthand way we have of thinking about things or people, is not ultimately useful, or not complete, in terms of understanding who people are.

CK: It’s interesting that you say, “It was fun to see her blossom like that.” How well do you know the characters at the start of a book?

NR: When I start a book, I usually start with a character or a set of characters and a question. I take the time of writing the book to figure out the answers to that question. The simple question with this book was what would happen if a group of really different people were thrown into a dangerous situation in the woods and had to fight for their lives? At the beginning, going into the trip, I did have a good sense of who these characters were, but I didn’t know what would happen. They had tests I had planned that I knew were going to happen, and then some other things that just happened. So over the course of writing the book, I got to know them, and they got to know each other. But no, I didn’t know what was going to happen with some of the characters, like Gwen. That’s part of the joy. I never want to have too clear of an idea of what’s going to happen at the beginning, or it strangles the project. I have to have a sense of mystery to keep my own interest sparked.

CK: In an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), you mentioned that you had spent two years writing a novel that had lost its fun and was no longer working. How did the abandonment of the previous book affect the writing of Lost Canyon? Had you already severed your emotional commitment to the previous project, or were you flirting with Lost Canyon while working on the other book?

NR: I had severed it. Though I am often poly-amorous when it comes to books, I am often working on two at a time, so that when I get tired of one, or reach a wall with one, I can pull out the other for a while. But that wasn’t what happened here. I had worked on one book for a couple of years, but it just wasn’t alive. Like my other books, that one was more historical in nature, but it wasn’t working. I had even taken several months off after Wingshooters and the book tour to really get going on the work for that book. I was writing, producing the pages, but it just didn’t feel alive to me. Finally, I decided I needed to set it aside for a while. So I took a backpacking vacation. What you read in that interview was true: I was in the high Sierras when the idea struck me that I should be writing about what it felt like to be out there. So the door was cracked open, and this other idea for another book walked right in. And it arrived almost whole. If you’re lucky, maybe once or twice in a career, you are struck by lightning like that.

CK: Can you talk about how this book is different than the past ones, and was that part of the “lightning strike” of that original inspiration? For example, did you know right away it was going to be an adventure?

Deliverance is about four middle-aged white guys of the same social class. I wanted to create an adventure story that was more reflective of the world as I know it: racially and economically diverse. I also wanted to write a book that was both an adventure novel and a social novel, together.

NR: Most of my other books have been based on past events. Traditionally, they have story lines that jump back and forth in time and fairly complex, or fractured, narrative structures. I think part of the reason this one came out the way it did was that the energy had been building from the frustration of the other book, which was again, a complex historical novel. So when I got this idea, everything about it happened like a slingshot. I wanted it to be as straight as could be. And I did want it to be an adventure story. In fact the book I had in mind was James Dickey’s Deliverance. I loved that book. I wanted to do that kind of book, but differently. Deliverance is about four middle-aged white guys of the same social class. I wanted to create an adventure story that was more reflective of the world as I know it: racially and economically diverse. I also wanted to write a book that was both an adventure novel and a social novel, together. I had not necessarily seen that done before.

CK: Having your urban hikers stumble onto the pot plantations in the Sierras is an effective plot device and makes for a compelling story, but I also feel it may not be as simple as it appears. What are some of the connections between the wilderness pot plantations, drug trafficking, and the concerns your characters grapple with in the “safety” of their urban environment?

NR: Well. You can’t get away. You cannot escape from economic difficulty, racism, or environmental concerns. So there are pot fields that are grown on public lands, wilderness areas, and there is definitely an interconnection between what is happening there and the gang activity and the drug activity that is happening in Highland Park and Cypress Park, where Oscar lives.  And of course, Gwen is aware of the devastating impact of drugs on the lives of the young people she works with. These things are all interrelated and connected. California is incredibly diverse. It is so beautiful, but there is a lot of drug production here too. According to Southern Poverty Law Center, it is also the home of more hate groups than any other state in the United States. And it’s hard to think of all that prejudice and all that diversity happening in one place. On the other hand, it’s kind of a microcosm of what’s happening across the whole country.

CK: I had no idea about the hate groups. I find that as depressing as listening to some of the current political rhetoric. Is there hope for change? Do you think we humans will ever develop the skills or mindset to move beyond these kinds of fears of difference?

NR: Even with all the tough stuff and difficulty that happens in my book, it’s still optimistic. The dynamic between the characters and what happens when they come back are all positive.  And I believe the ways that their eyes open to each other is actually very hopeful. So I believe, and I try to demonstrate this with my books, that if people are given a real opportunity to interact with each other, to start to see each other as people, they will come to realize that they all have more things in common than not. They want a lot of the same things. They want the best for their children. They want opportunity. When people are able to actually interact with one another, their minds and hearts start to change. In my book Wingshooters, part of the difficulty was that in rural Wisconsin there was no exposure to difference. I can’t imagine that some of the vitriol in some of our current politics would be said if people got to know others on a person-to-person basis. So part of it is exposure, and part of it is openness to exposure, which might be the more difficult part. I also think that some of the high volume of negative rhetoric is a result of fear—the last gasp of folks who think they are losing something in a rapidly-changing world.

CK: Well, I think one of the things that many of your books accomplish is that they seem to show a way through the difficulty. A path. Lost Canyon was fairly positive, but Wingshooters was pretty dour. How do you incorporate the navigation of the reader through the difficult situations you depict? Does that play into the responsibilities of the artist?

I write about race and inequality and injustice, but ultimately I am an optimistic person. I think it’s important that while we depict the ugly dark side of life that it’s just as important to embrace the beauty and the joy.

NR: I write about a lot of things. I write about race and inequality and injustice, but ultimately I am an optimistic person. I think it’s important that while we depict the ugly dark side of life that it’s just as important to embrace the beauty and the joy. And even in a book like Wingshooters, where there was so much dysfunction and trauma, there was also a lot of beauty and joy. So in that book there is the beauty of the natural landscape, there’s the dog, and the relationship between Mikey and her grandfather. I think that a big part of the role of the artist is to show the way through. You know, James Baldwin was probably one of my biggest influences as a writer. No one wrote more eloquently about racism and poverty, about incredible systemic prejudice in the country. Yet, there was also joy and optimism in his work. There was a trying to get through. I want to show the hard things, but I also want to show that there is a way through.

CK: You mentioned the beauty of nature in Wingshooters. In your last two books, nature seems to provide an almost reflective surface for the human action. Can you tell me how you choose the setting for your books and what role you think setting plays?

NR: As I said, I start with character and a question, and that will often present the place. Once I know what that setting is, I think it’s critical to get that sense of place right. You want your readers to be able to see and sense and smell and feel and understand the physical world that your characters inhabit. Otherwise, it’s just a vague backdrop. And those settings are important because they shape character and experience inside the book. In some cases, they can even be a kind of character. And it’s not about describing every little detail, every leaf on the tree or crack in the sidewalk, but about capturing the right bits of detail, like a well-crafted line drawing. The details I used in Lost Canyon, for example, include very specific details about different neighborhoods in the city. The details of the trip in the Sierras all come from specific things I saw on different hikes in different areas there. I had been recording these things for years, not knowing what I was going to do with them. Fortunately, when it came time to write the book, I had a whole collection to draw from, which I was then able to weave into the book.

CK: You have a professional career, a marriage, and an accomplished writing life, which includes appearances and interviews like this one, yet you seem to handle your busy life with a great deal of grace. How do you manage to balance everything and consistently bring novels to completion?

I’m not sure, I just do. I write, but I don’t write on the days I go to work, because my job is too time consuming and demanding. That means I write on weekends, holidays, and vacations. Occasionally, I will be able to tack on a Friday afternoon or Monday morning, but it’s mostly just the time away from work. But I’m also pretty strict about that. I don’t fudge it. If I’m not working, I really am writing. Right now, I’m still percolating. I’m taking a bit of a break from writing, so I have my weekends. And I’ve been able to play, go to brunch, whatever. It’s been nice. But when I’m in a working groove, that all goes by the wayside. My weekend mornings are reserved for writing. That means when I’m on a project, I also can’t go out late on a weekend night because I have to get up early to write. And the only thing I really make an exception for is hiking, because I do have to get that in too. But it is hard, and it has gotten harder over the years. That’s maybe one of the biggest downsides of not having an academic kind of job—I don’t get summers off or three weeks at Christmas to write. It’s a challenge.

CK: It sounds like you are very consistent about it though. How did you develop such intense discipline?

NR: I don’t really think of myself as that disciplined. It’s just become such a habit. And I think that one of the things that contributed to the consistency was my training as an athlete. I played basketball in high school and college, and I had to get up really early and be at the gym every day. That got me used to doing a little bit every day in service of a greater goal. That kind of habit of practice directly translated into writing for me.

Art creates empathy and a way to identify with someone you thought was very different… Art is effective in changing the way people approach the world.

CK: While many recognize that your fiction is hard to classify, some talk about your work in terms of LGBT fiction and some label you a regional writer. What do you think about these labels? 

NR: Oh, I don’t mind as long as I’m multi-labeled. I’ve been called a Los Angeles writer, a mid-western writer, LGBT writer, historical, noir. My critics have put me in a lot of boxes, and those boxes become shorthand and, just like the assumptions we talked about earlier, they can be used as a way to dismiss. I am fortunate because I have become a part of so many boxes.  So I don’t mind about the labels. I’m proud to have written deeply about a place I truly love, or about issues I really care about it. I feel I have given voice to stories that don’t usually get told.  Really, I’m just happy to be read, and that people are finding my books.

CK:  You worked with Head Start and with the Los Angeles school board before working with the Children’s Institute, so it appears that you have focused your career on advocating for opportunities for children, the most powerless of the powerless, in some sense.  Was this a deliberate career path for you?

NR: When I was growing up here in LA, I knew a lot of people who had the same, and more, intelligence, capacity, talent, but who may not have had the opportunity to go to college or to have a productive career because they had so many other factors working against them, like living in traumatic situations, not having solid parents, or not having a good education. It was striking to me how many kids were lost, were just given up on. A lot of these kids, had they had the right opportunities or support, might have gone on completely different trajectories. And so I wanted to do what I could so that kids would have the opportunities and support that they deserve. So what drives the work is the recognition of the real inequities in play, the obstacles that face kids in poverty, especially.

CK: Frank Gehry recently designed a new center for the Children’s Institute in Watts, and it is slated to break ground in 2018.  It is estimated that the center will serve approximately five thousand children affected by poverty, trauma, or violence. But the problems facing these children are not strictly isolated to Los Angeles. Isn’t this a national crisis? Do you believe that, as a nation, we are addressing these problems effectively?

I’ve been called a Los Angeles writer, a mid-western writer, LGBT writer, historical, noir. My critics have put me in a lot of boxes, and those boxes become shorthand and, just like the assumptions we talked about earlier, they can be used as a way to dismiss. I am fortunate because I have become a part of so many boxes.  So I don’t mind about the labels. I’m proud to have written deeply about a place I truly love, or about issues I really care about it. I feel I have given voice to stories that don’t usually get told.

NR: You’re right, the challenges facing Los Angeles are also facing the whole country. And no, I don’t think we are dealing with the problems particularly effectively. What is encouraging though is that there are effective models out there. There are efforts that are working. What is working needs to be bottled and replicated. I’m thinking particularly of a Jesuit boys’ school in Watts that has sent, for the past seven years, all of their graduates to college. One hundred percent. They’ve done this not by just providing them with education, but by acknowledging their social and emotional issues as well. They also provide kids with internships to various offices throughout Los Angeles so that these kids get to go downtown or to Century City to work. This enables these kids to envision another reality—another future. That is actually the biggest barrier for these kids, bigger than poverty, bigger than violence. Many of the kids that we serve cannot imagine a different kind of life. That’s a big part of why we are building the Frank Gehry building. It will be a place of services, but it is also a place of beauty and magic in a community where there is not enough. There will be spaces for the therapeutic work that we do, but there will also be a dedicated art room, basketball court, computer lab, teen center, and resources to develop the skills needed for success, like getting a job. Jobs are important. When you have a community where there is very little employment, it feeds into the general despair. Folks who are well-employed don’t really understand this problem, or that dignity is tied up in being able to work. A job enables someone, of course, to live, but it also provides an important sense of identity. I think that’s also one of things I address in Lost Canyon, by showing the lives and work of people who aren’t normally seen in fiction. To show their humanity.

CK: How effective do you think art is in bringing awareness to social concerns? Does art work that way?

NR: Absolutely. In fact, I think that art works better than anything else. Folks are never going to just change their mind about something because you tell them they should. They are going to change their mind because they feel a stake in it. Art is a tremendous way to create that kind of stake because it enables you to enter the experience of another person and see the world through their eyes. That capacity is something that doesn’t really exist in other realms. Art creates empathy and a way to identify with someone you thought was very different. I think that art is very effective in changing the way that people approach the world.

CK: That being said, how important is it that we keep arts in public education?

NR: Hugely. History, nonfiction, science can tell you the what, when, and where, but it doesn’t tell you the why or the how. That is what the arts provide. It gets behind the curtain, the motivations and causes. It gets to the thing behind the action so that the actions can be understood. And when students are only drilled, and are not given exposure to arts, to inventiveness, to creativity and playfulness, they become one sided. It works like a muscle that hasn’t been used. When creativity becomes atrophied, it makes it very difficult to respond to situations in the world, to the intangible things that make up this experience—the magic of the world. One of my favorite stories is about Steve Jobs attributing a calligraphy class he took in college to the design aesthetic of Apple products. At the time it seemed like a totally useless thing to practice, but it ended up having a huge impact on a global scale. He makes the point that you can’t connect the dots going forward; you don’t know where things will lead. You can only connect the dots retrospectively. So I think playfulness, experimentation, openness, and being really present in your life and environment is hugely important.

Nina, one last question. Despite your full plate, are you going to get some rest and relaxation as the weather warms? Any plans for backpacking the remote canyons of the Sierras this summer?

NR: I am. I’m going in July for about a week, and it’s actually a vacation. I will not be doing any work. I can’t wait.

Carrie Kellerby has a BFA in Art History from CU, Boulder; a BA in Creative Writing from CMU; and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.

She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, and the faculty advisor and co-editor of the Arts and Graphics department at Lunch Ticket.

She teaches freshman composition at Colorado Mesa University, has just finished her 200-hour yoga teacher training, is a freelance journalist, and spends way too much time gardening.

Novelist Vu Tran was born outside of Saigon five months after the city fell to the North Vietnamese, immigrated to the United States when he was five, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Likewise, Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015), begins in Vietnam and intersects American and Vietnamese cultures. The novel opens in italics with the voice of Suzy, a yet-unknown character, describing in first-person her escape from Vietnam with her young daughter. This voice from the past recurs through the book as a counterpoint narrative to that of the primary protagonist, Robert, a Caucasian Oakland, CA police officer, who is kidnapped in an opening scene by Vietnamese gangsters on orders from Sonny, their mafia boss. Sonny’s wife, Suzy, who is Robert’s ex-wife, has recently disappeared. Sonny enlists Robert’s help in finding her. Through smooth and powerful prose that alternates between Robert and Suzy’s stories, Tran creates a compelling mystery entwined with a complex immigration story. Dragonfish is a powerful noir mixed with sentimentality, heartache, and unanswerable questions.

Vu Tran teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tran was selected as a 2011 finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, and received the 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award, as well as honors from Glimmer Train Stories and Michigan Quarterly Review. His stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, The Southern Review, and the Harvard Review.

Vu Tran was interviewed via Skype by J. Sam Williams in February 2016.

*     *     *

I met Vu Tran at Antioch University Los Angeles during the December MFA residency. At his residency seminar and reading, he struck me as calm and inviting, with a humble and fun confidence. And why not? Tran is a successful writer and—by reading some comments on other online interviews—a well-respected teacher. Tran brings a truthful voice and spirit to his work. During his reading, his performance gave each line of dialogue, description, and pause the perfect amount of emotion. The next day, Tran asked a room full of MFA students—and some faculty—to explore their own emotional connection to why we like the stories we like. He noted that there is a very human desire for narrative, and asked us “What does it say that every major religion, society, etc. has a creation myth?” He asked why the Paris attacks of the past year touched us, and ended with the assertion that stories are ways to organize our ideas of what it means to be human. He invited divergent views and welcomed discussion.

When the time came for the interview, despite my preparation, I found myself nervous. I started the interview with a mistake: In attempting to ask him how much of Tran’s personal life was reflected in Dragonfish I assumed he’d used the phrase “Write what you know.” He very kindly corrected me.

Vu Tran: I don’t like saying that, actually. Well, I never say that exclusively. I say a couple things: I say that sometimes you don’t know what you know until you write it. I feel like ‘writing what you know’ has become a bit of a catch-all phrase and people really don’t—it’s such a kind of easy, universally-accepted mantra that honestly people don’t think about anymore. […] I think some people have interpreted it as ‘write what you’ve experienced.’ And the thing is that, a lot of times we don’t know what we know until we write through it. And the other thing is that you don’t have to write about your life to write about yourself. I’ve always thought that you should write who you are. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re writing about yourself. There’s so many different layers in that comment that I don’t think people think about. People throw it out as advice, as a mantra, and the way people interpret it is simplistic.

Sam Williams: How much of your own personal experience, personal story, and personal narrative was reflected in the novel Dragonfish?

VT: Well, in terms of things that have actually happened to me, the premise of Suzy—her daughter [and her], escaping Vietnam by boat—I did that with my mom, my sister. We also spent six days at sea. We also landed in Malaysia, and also spent months in that refugee island. So all of that comes from my life. But for the most part, I tend not to write what people, I guess, would call autobiographical, but I think—and any writer would say this— that you become, your life and your personality become, a filter for the things that get on the page. So even if it doesn’t actually happen to me, I’m still the filter, so parts of me end up filtering a characterization of someone who would bear no resemblance to me. I think they might have, say, my selfishness, or they might have my obsessiveness, they might have my sincerity, whatever. You see? So the filter of who I am is always there. I feel like maybe other people are different, but I can’t help but write like that.

SW: How much do you think that experience of escaping Vietnam as a child has contributed to your passion toward the arts?

VT: That’s a good question. That is kind of hard to know, or know how to measure. I mean, I’m sure it has. The question for me has always been, “Well, if I had not experienced that, would I still be a writer? Would I still be the same kind of writer? If I had grown up in Vietnam, would I be a writer? That’s just something I’ve always been curious about. Of course that’s impossible to answer.

You know, everything I went through, I don’t remember any of it. Which might be a good thing. I suspect, though, that it had to have been traumatic in some way. The only way I could put it—for lack of putting it a better way, is—I feel like the shadow of that experience has been following me, and I’ve always been propelled by it in some way.

“I don’t feel like anyone wrote a great novel because they heard a great piece of advice. I think it just has to do with you, and writing, and you sitting down at your damn desk, and reading.”

I think the other thing that is clear in my mind is less that actual experience of escaping Vietnam, but more my experience of growing up as an immigrant and as a refugee, you know when you—in many ways everyone feels like an outsider on some level—but when you are clearly an outsider in the sense that you are raised one way and in one world at home and another way at school and in the world around that you see on TV and everything—you inevitably do feel that you are on the outside of things. And I think that has, more than anything, informed how I write. If you’re on the inside you have no reason to be uncomfortable, no reason to really observe. But when you’re on the outside, you’re desperate to get in. You have, in a sense, a more artistic and critical eye. And I think that has really informed me as an artist, writer, whatever you want to call it.

I wanted to further discuss Dragonfish’s epistolary sections in which the details of escaping Vietnam were described.

SW: What about the letters and memories were attractive to you? What was attractive about these devices to you as a writer?

VT: I’ve always liked writing in that mode, and especially when I was writing my short stories, I felt like I was at my best when I was writing in this kind of melancholy tone. If you’ve seen the movies of Wan Kar Wai, or you’ve listened to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, it’s that kind of melancholy that I’m talking about. I always end up, whether I want to or not, going to that voice, that tone. […] When I really found the novel, it was when I figured out the letters. I was 70 pages into the novel before I figured out, “Oh let’s do this thing here.” And then I wrote all the letters. Only when I had written the letters did I go back and kind of return to the so-called crime narrative, because it informed—I think it was the emotional foundation for all the character’s behavior, and it was the emotional foundation for the story itself. And it worked! I found that voice pretty quickly because it is a voice of not just melancholy, it’s a kind of working out of things that can’t be worked out, which is inevitably a sad enterprise, because you’re trying to figure out, you’re trying to answer these questions that you’ve always struggled with, and you know no matter how well you articulate that difficulty you’ll never actually answer the question. Which, in this case, was “Why did I leave my daughter?” “Am I a bad person?” “Why did I do that?” and “What do I do now?” And those are questions that Suzy can never ask herself. And for some reason I just kind of knew how to write that voice of someone asking those questions.

SW: What was the process for finding that voice? Was it a bumpy road for the novel until you found that voice?

VT: It was very bumpy. You know, I sold the novel in May of 2009 and I had 60 pages, so it was a partial, which was great but I spent the next two years applying for jobs, which was very time consuming. I was doing all of these other events. Suddenly I was leaving the country and leaving town a lot, and that distracted me. And then I moved to Chicago with a girlfriend, which, that was difficult, and being in a new city, starting a new job, all these things became excuses for kind of procrastinating on the novel, because I couldn’t figure it out—something felt missing. I felt like all I had was a premise. I felt like I couldn’t go beyond the premise. Once I figured that sort of epistolary structure and the purpose of why [Suzy] was writing the letters, it all came together. Now it still took forever to write, but I felt like I had something, and up until that point I was afraid I didn’t even have a novel.

SW: That was the point where you were hooked in. Where you knew you had it.

VT: Yeah, and I think most readers, when they tell me about the novel, that’s when they say the novel came together for them too. So that makes me happy because that means I can trust in my instincts.

I wanted to ask Tran about his experience in the publishing world—specifically as a Vietnamese immigrant. My nervousness returned, because as a white man I try to be careful and as considerate as possible when discussing race. I still feel as though I can’t be too careful. It goes without saying that I was relieved when Tran was more than happy to talk about issues relating to his ethnicity.

SW: I was hoping you could comment on the writing and publishing world as a man of Vietnamese descent. Have you faced any difficulties?

VT: [A long pause] I have, but I’m hesitant to say that those difficulties are directly connected to the ethnicity that I am. I don’t know. Which is not to say that agents don’t… My difficulties have been most people’s difficulties. But yeah, I remember when I was trying to find an agent, when I only had my story collection and I was very conscious about not making—even though those stories were all set in Vietnam—I didn’t want to make them too overtly about the war. I had agents who would tell me, “Oh, that one story with all the war stuff—you need more shit like that.” That happened. But no—and it’s not a comment on other people’s experience at all—just mine, but I don’t feel as if I’ve experienced anything specifically connected to my ethnicity, negatively speaking. I think that’s partly because maybe I’ve been lucky, but also because I almost don’t want to notice those things. I want to have the right to not give a shit.

SW: In literature, or, in fact, the entertainment world, do you feel like people with Asian phenotypes are still depicted in stereotypical ways? Have you seen any changes over time?

VT: That I am very aware of, and that does make me angry. The reason it makes me angry is not that it’s racist, necessarily, or that it’s offensive. What is offensive is creative laziness. So when I see that new show by Tina Fey, who I really love, that new show on Netflix, Kimmy Schmidt, and there’s an Asian character who is supposed to be Vietnamese, but it’s played by an actor who is not Vietnamese—he actually has a Japanese accent, not a Vietnamese accent, and they say his name means penis or something silly like that. That makes me angry because I feel that’s creative laziness. It’s not racist, it’s just lazy. All she had to do was look that shit up. I do find that Asian women tend to be fetishized. And Asian men tend to be completely nonexistent or sexually neutered. I think, especially in popular culture, movies, and TV, the depiction of Asians is, first of all, very narrow, and second of all, is still not much there. You see more and more of it, which is good. I know that this new show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, has an Asian male lead, which is kind of stunning. I like the idea of having Asian characters whose prominent attribute is not that they are Asian. I like that idea. I see that a little bit more now.

SW: But it’s a slow process.

VT: It’s a slow process, but the thing is, I feel that Asian’s bare a responsibility as well. Yes, the opportunities are very, very slim for Asian actors, Asian writers, Asian artists, but when you get that chance, don’t be lazy. Don’t be creatively lazy. Be interesting. Do something unexpected. I hope that the more and more Asians there are, that have a voice, can do something unexpected and can know that that is their responsibility—to be creative and interesting, not to just be completely predictable.

It’s really nice to see Viet Thanh Nguyen with his novel The Sympathizer get so much notice and, you know, Nam Le with his book The Boat about six years ago. There are more Vietnamese-American writers now, there are more—the thing that really heartens me is that fact that Hanya Yanagihara got so much notice for A Little Life. She is, I believe, she is Hawaiian, but she is of Japanese descent. But the book has nothing to do with any Asian characters. I’m not saying that’s what we should be doing, I’m just saying it’s nice that that is a thing. That an Asian writer can write about something that has nothing to do with her ethnicity. And it’s getting a lot of admiration, and it’s selling well. Things like that really hearten me.

We talked a little more about his views on teaching, and that he thought it was very important to discuss the process of publication with his students. I asked Tran what is working on next.

VT: I don’t know yet. I need to be writing. I haven’t written anything new in about 16 months. I’m getting kind of antsy. But I tend to really work it out in my head before I commit pen to paper, if you will, even though I don’t write longhand. I’m fancying the idea of writing a Vietnamese Gothic novel, where the French colonialism characters in there are a comparison of the French influence and American influence on Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, though I think the novel would take place in America. But I kind of want to tell that story in the framework of a Gothic novel. I’m still working that out in my head. That’s the best I can describe it. Hopefully I can start on it sometime soon. Hopefully it won’t take as long, though it probably, most definitely, will.

I wondered why was it that Tran’s residency presentation felt like a conversation and not a lecture. I discovered the answer as we wrapped up the interview:

SW: Any advice to students everywhere in MFA programs?

VT: I only ever have one piece of advice—and I really mean this—that people need to be wary of all good advice. I feel the MFA world is just full of people who love to feel wise, and love to give these nuggets of wisdom. And it’s well intentioned, often. But when you’re a teacher, when you’re a writer—but especially when you’re a teacher—you end up having to kind of create a system of thought, and you have to be confident in it if you’re teaching it. Too often that ends up being just a reflection of your own experience.

The thing about it is that sometimes people in the MFA world, they hear a writer and they hear something they think is so profound, so earth-shakingly true, that they end up taking it as gospel. I say, yeah, if it sounds great, take it. But every once in a while, question it. Because everyone’s different and I think it’s just fucking boring to hear the same things over and over. At the end of the day, I don’t feel like anyone wrote a great novel because they heard a great piece of advice. I think it just has to do with you, and writing, and you sitting down at your damn desk, and reading.

Williams grew up in Bow, NH and now lives with his wife in Monterey, CA. Williams received his BA from Principia College in Sociology. Williams is a freelance sports columnist and podcast guest, Editor-in-Chief at theimmix.com, and a current MFA student at AULA.