Becoming: A Multimodal Exploration of Identity & Family with Cathy Linh Che

During AWP 2025, I had the opportunity to sit down with poet Cathy Linh Che.  The last year has been a busy one with the debut of her video installation, Appocalips, a short documentary film We Were the Scenery, and the forthcoming publication of her second poetry book Becoming Ghost. At the same time, she joined Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program as Core Faculty in Poetry.

Cathy Linh Che’s new book, Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), is due in stores on April 29, 2025. Cathy received her MFA from New York University. She is the author of the poetry book, Split (Alice James, 2014), and co-author of An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books, 2023). She won the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize; the 2015 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; and the 2016 Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review, among many others. Her poems have been published in Hyperallergic, Hyphen, poets.org, and AAWW’s The Margins. Her video installation, Appocalips, and film, We Were the Scenery, are accessible through https://www.Cathylinhche.com. Cathy is a Vietnamese-American writer whose work often explores the painful and unspoken while managing to bring dignity to her topic of focus and herself and others in the process of making meaning and finding voice.

Valerie Nyberg: I’m also curious about how the name Cathy Linh is bound with your identity? How do your names intersect with how you transition from family to friends to work and all those different spaces?

CATHY LINH CHE: I want people to know that I’m Vietnamese, but it’s not always obvious because I have an unusual last name. My last name Che is not an atypical Vietnamese last name. It comes from indigenous people of the region where my father grew up in Qui Nhon. The surname Che was given by Vietnamese people to all Cham people. Because the Chams are matrilineal, it became illegal for Vietnamese people to marry a Cham woman, because then the Cham population would increase, and the Vietnamese didn’t want that. Initially the central and southern areas of Vietnam were called The Kingdom of Champa until that kingdom was conquered by the Vietnamese. Also, Che is actually not a real last name. It comes from the honorific reference for the sergeant who led the forces against the Vietnamese. His name was Chế Bồng Nga. I wanted a way to identify myself more clearly as Vietnamese because my last name doesn’t signal this. My middle name Linh clearly communicates that I’m Vietnamese. So, my name refers to three identities, Vietnamese, Champa, and “American,” which are all identities that I traverse and adopt and switch into and out of.

VNN: How did you become a poet?  Specifically, why poetry versus other genres?

CLC:  Poetry always made sense to me. I’ve read and watched plays; I watched films; and I read novels and essays, but poetry always spoke to me. There’s no other way to say it other than that. Poetry spoke about things I felt like I hadn’t read or seen anywhere else.

As a young person trying to understand my life, I’d discovered poets, like Lucille Clifton, who wrote about the experience of being sexually violated. When I read her, I felt, Oh, I’m not alone. Poetry gave me a sense of community. It also gave me permission to explore what had happened to me and my family.

When I was younger, my favorite novels were poetic, like Invisible Man. I felt very moved by the strangeness of it, but also by the gorgeousness of the sentences. Then there’s Dostoevsky Notes from Underground and also, The Sound and the Fury––I don’t know how I would feel about reading it now––but these books were very beautiful to me.

VNN:  Your forthcoming book of poetry, Becoming Ghost, explores your parents’ experience as extras in the movie Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam War, but this story is also examined in a video installation that debuted last year called Appocalips, as well as your short film We Were the Scenery, which premiered this year. The visual presentation of your parents story braids together their voices, home videos mixed with newly created video, and your poetry carefully constructed into a poignant narrative. How does your poetry and the film speak to one another?

CLC:  I am a cinematic thinker. My memory is visual, and my imagination is also visual. I am very interested in poetry’s visual aspects. I don’t mean concrete poetry on the page only. I mean the pictures that poetic images create in someone’s mind. Film is also a visual medium. So, the poetry book and the films engage in the same story, using visual language, to create a larger and fuller sense of my parents’ story.

Becoming Ghost uses poetry, in a séance-like way, to evoke different voices on the page in a way that would be harder to reenact in documentary film. For example, I don’t have records of my grandmother’s voice, but I do have her stories through my mother and through my auntie. For the poems, I inhabit that voice. Through speculative poetry, I imagined what it would be like if my grandmother were alive and we were making a film together.

I wanted the film to deliberately also include joy. I would like for my poetry to do that, but it hasn’t gone that direction yet. It’s really easy for the joy to exist in film because my parents are funny. They are both funny and honest, and they talk directly about things that are sad too. It’s not like they shy away from sadness, but they’re funny together. I wanted to show that. I felt like the film provided the opportunity to let their voices be unmediated by my perspective. It allowed my parents’ voices to be in Vietnamese on screen. I do translate their Vietnamese into English as subtitles, but I don’t translate their story for them into a poem.

The film was a way for me to get out of the way to honor my parents voices more fully, as voices outside of me. It’s driven by a conversation we have, but you don’t hear my voice.

VNN:  How do the two media diverge?

CLC:  Poetry is very focused on language. And even though the language of my parents’ interviews are the basis of the film, the film pairs language with video. The film features the VHS tape of Apocalypse Now that my parents recorded from a 1980s television broadcast; Super 8 home video footage; VHS home video footage; new digital footage; new Super 8 film footage.

With poetry, people use their imaginations and draw from their own visual bank, but with film, they actually have visuals presented to them. Film offers an amazing opportunity, because it acts like an intervention for the audience, showing them, no, no, this is what Vietnam really looks like.

VNN:  What process did you use to create your book Becoming Ghost?

CLC:  I found the idea that my parents, as refugees playing extras, to actually be a little too rich at first, meaning I was afraid of doing the research because it felt so extensive, and I wasn’t sure that I was doing research appropriately.

When I was focused on writing my family stories, I felt very authoritative. However, with Apocalypse Now there’s a lot of energy around it. There’s a lot of behind the scenes talk and chatter. It’s a larger than life production. I think it felt like a challenge because other people knew things that I didn’t know enough about, and perhaps I needed to become more informed about.

The sheer number of conversations that came at me every time I would read my poems pushed me. I watched Hearts of Darkness, the film about Apocalypse Now’s “making of” that Eleanor Coppola shot. I read articles. I became acquainted with folklore of the film set.

Then, I had to figure out the angle of this project. At the time, I wanted the project to take on different modalities. I listed out the different possibilities for the film. I thought: this can exist as a film, a performance, some prose, some poetry, or some collages.

In listing out the possibilities, I felt like I could work through this project and explore it in many ways.  Then I realized that was a lot. How do I start? I had to make a decision. Somebody else told me that they thought it was an important project. They taught Vietnam War film and studies and thought my project would be useful because they always had to show Apocalypse Now, there’s no counter argument. I pursued the project, in part, because of this.

I had the idea that I could use the golden shovel form, which is a constraint-based form that helped me marginalize Coppola’s words and fill them in with my parents. I thought, let’s try to see if it works. It helped to generate material. Keeping it simple, and trying one thing at a time, was helpful.

VNN:  How do you determine which poems go into the book and which poems don’t?

CLC:  That’s an interesting question.  My earlier manuscript had many love poems. My friends wondered, how do these fit in? I felt like they might. But over time, as the book began to take shape, it became less about my relationship and its ensuing heartbreak and more about my family and the film. 

I had to try to organize it into a manuscript, so I printed out all the poems. I used painters’ tape to put them up on a big wall and move them around. When I had an order I thought that worked, I sent it to a friend, for them to give me feedback. Then, I tried to do the same process again and again until it started taking shape.

I think it’s like Jello. At a certain point the Jello starts setting. It finds its shape and structure. The poetry book starts loose and sloshing, and then, as it spends more time in the cooler, solidifies. I also had an editor who was helpful in trying to stress test it, and made useful suggestions, because the ending was just missing something for so many years.

I think it’s like Jello. At a certain point the Jello starts setting. It finds its shape and structure. The poetry book starts loose and sloshing, and then, as it spends more time in the cooler, solidifies. I also had an editor who was helpful in trying to stress test it, and made useful suggestions, because the ending was just missing something for so many years.

VNN:  How many friend readers do you have?

CLC:  I probably sent the draft to at least eight people or maybe ten people to give me feedback. They gave great feedback. Sometimes it’s still confusing, even if the feedback is fantastic. If the feedback or the suggestions don’t make sense to you, the revision process won’t feel organic. Sometimes I felt like I was in this mystery, saying, Give me the answer. But as much as other people tried to help, it didn’t always illuminate the issue. So, I just kept trying and trying until it worked. It needed something to round it out. After living with the project for so long, I could just dash off the last few poems and put them in to have them fill in like the last puzzle pieces.

VNN:  You’ve received fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review. How have you become so successful?

CLC:  I think what was really helpful was during my MFA program, people passed around writing opportunities that I didn’t know about. For instance, the Poets & Writers announcement came through my MFA listserv, and I was like, Okay, I’ll apply to that. I would not have known to apply to it without being told that this was available to me. The same was true of the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. The same was true with Kundiman. A friend told me I should apply to Poets House’s fellowship program.

So I think early in the process of applying to opportunities, it’s very hard. I’d apply for twenty things and get into one thing. I would be like, Oh, that’s enough to carry me for the whole year. Over time, you start developing a bank of materials, because all of these types of opportunities require the same material over and over again. They want a work sample; a work plan; a statement describing what are you going to do with the gift of the time or money; and a personal statement. For six years I didn’t apply. I was working too much.  My friend said, “You know what would be helpful, going on a writing residency.” I was like, Okay, I’ll try to apply. At the time, it usually took me three weeks to prepare an application.  We sat down, just hanging out when she said, “Oh, just give me ten minutes. I’m going to apply to a residency.” It was the same one I was applying for. That’s when she shared a trade secret, that she used the same materials that had brought her success in previous applications over and over again. I felt embarrassed by the personal statement even though it was successful. Even though it felt embarrassing to me, she encouraged me to use it anyway to see what happened. I used it and it was successful. Over time, I realized you can use something that you don’t like but work to revise it more to become what you want bit by bit. It’s an iterative process. I think being successful at applying to residencies or grants or anything like that is a methodology. In applying to residencies and grants, I create a very neat folder for myself. Everything else might be messy, but my grant drive is very neat. From that I’ve developed a whole bank of materials I can use for opportunities.

VNN: How would you describe your writing process?

CLC:  I work mainly during the day, then at night, because I have The Grind before midnight, I write a poem.  In the intervening times, before or after work, that’s when I do the biz of writing, which includes tasks like we’re writing our film stuff right now, which is actually more work than writing and more work than work sometimes. It also includes endless email deliveries.

Every night I draft a poem. I have daily writing practice, and then at a certain point, I can tell if I like a poem. Then I copy it into my unpublished poems folder where I work on it.  A lot of the poems I write, I throw away.  I don’t keep them; they’re more part of the daily process. That’s where I’m at, at this moment.

At the time when I was writing my poetry manuscript, I had to produce specific types of poems. It was harder, because it’s not fun, intuitive. It’s a little more like you have to face something and look at something or write into something. Left to my own devices, I do more automatic writing. For example, I  used to only write about heartbreak. That’s why I had so many poems about heartbreak in the book.  That’s my writing process. It’s quite different for poets, I think. When I used to take the subway, I would either read or write a poem. That was one of my favorite things to do. To be honest, I love taking the subway and just reading and writing, but now I do it before bed on my phone.

VNN:  You’ve said that writing is more of a calling than a career. What is your advice for anyone looking to become a writer? What are some pitfalls to avoid?

CLC:  I think writing is a calling for me more than a career, because writing keeps me feeling very fresh and connected, as a person. My mind feels connected to my intuitive self or something greater than myself.

For anybody looking to become a writer, what’s my advice? I do think finding a community is really, really important. I only had teachers and mentors for a short duration where they taught me a lot. They facilitated an important space, but it’s the people I met as peers who have remained with me. Remember my eight-to-ten readers?  They are my colleagues, my friends, and I still have an MFA group chat. I started my MFA eighteen years ago. When your book comes out, your MFA people are the ones who are celebrating with each other. You’re sitting at each other’s readings as you grow up together (as you go through the process together of the first book, the second book). These are really the people who will have your backs in all of these wonderful ways, because people eventually get teaching jobs, and then they invite you to read at their institutions. It’s out of a deep sense of admiration for each other’s work. Everybody starts out somewhere, then they keep moving forward together.

Pitfalls to avoid in writing… the writing world is a small world. It’s smaller than people think, even though we are at AWP and there’s 10,000 people here. Sometimes you don’t need to make an enemy. That doesn’t mean you can’t make change, but it’s important to consider that your enemy might be somebody you see again and again and again: like every year at AWP or in various other ways, because we’re all connected. It’s not that you can’t get mad. It’s not like you should let anybody off the hook, but it’s important to understand that sometimes it’s important to sit with your feelings for a little bit and interrogate them before popping off on social media.

I think another pitfall I have relates to a sense of rejection. I think it’s important not to take somebody else’s rejection of your work as a sign that your writing’s not worthy. Earlier, I told you about my method of sending out work. I feel like I’ve been on the other side now, where I’ve seen amazing writers, like truly amazing, amazing writers, but you can’t accept everybody. That doesn’t mean that the writing isn’t worthy. Instead, there were a number of random factors that go into what was and wasn’t accepted. Sometimes it’s taste, other times, it can be that the person reading your application is feeling cranky.  Or it could be a matter that your writing is amazing, but actually the most popular time for a residency is in July. If you asked for a March residency, you would have gotten in. But July was the only time that worked for you. So rejection isn’t a sign that your work isn’t good. In fact, you might not know who might be rooting for you somewhere later on because you gave your work a chance to be championed.