A Leap Into Space! Interview with Phoebe Wang
Phoebe Wang is the judge for the 2020 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award For Poetry. She’s a writer and educator based in Toronto, Canada and a first-generation Chinese-Canadian. Her debut collection of poetry, Admission Requirements, was published with McClelland and Stewart in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and nominated for the Trillium Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks and the co-editor of The Unpublished City anthology (Volume 2).
Recently her work has appeared in REFUSE: Canlit in Ruins (Bookhug, 2018), What the Poets are Doing (Nightwood, 2018) and is forthcoming in They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian-American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2020). She currently works with the organization Poetry In Voice and as a Writing and Learning Consultant at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
In this interview, Canthius board member Manahil Bandukwala talks to Phoebe about her role in nurturing BIPOC writers, submitting to contests, and what she’s looking for in a winning poem.
To learn more about Phoebe, follow her on Twitter @alittleprint or visit her website.
Canthius: A lot of your work over the past couple of years has been about working and collaborating with other writers, especially BIPOC writers. Why is community important?
Phoebe: I have a tendency to be more of a passive observer rather than a participant, but I remember when it occurred to me that I could shape or sway my social environment. I was 29, in a new city, entering the community by the way of the Creative Writing Masters at University of Toronto. I wanted intensely to avoid the competitiveness and drama that is ruinous to creativity and instead envisioned relations of support, openness and generosity, and I realized that I could deliberately foster the conditions where such sharing could take place. That was a powerful epiphany for me. Community itself is only as important as the values it makes transparent, values that often don’t coalesce until the gathering takes place. My community work officially began the day I invited all the alumni and current students in our MA program who identified as queer, disabled and BIPOC to meet up. From that simple act grew other initiatives like the ongoing BIPOC meet-ups, Fuel for Fire, The Unpublished City anthologies, and currently, Groundings, and supporting the next generation of writers through the new Creative Writing BFA program at OCAD University. The gathering and sharing has shown different writers what’s possible for their own careers and creative work– seeing the self-centering and success of other BIPOC and marginalized writers is transformative and holds the potentiality of breaking down barriers and reimagining current dynamics in publishing such as gatekeeping, hierarchies, privilege and other toxic relations. We can instead form communities around care, mentoring, transparency, solidarity and accountability.
Canthius: Through Poetry in Voice, you run poetry workshops at schools. How do you see the power of poetry manifest in the new generation?
Phoebe: When I’m doing these workshops and seeing a group of students unleashing their voices, I feel that it is truly what I’m meant to be doing, in ways that even surpass my own creative practice. I see the younger generation view poetry with a lot more nervousness and preconceived ideas than I would’ve expected, ideas that what is ‘poetic’ is elsewhere and not present in their own lives and stories. So when together we look closely at the materials of their lives, homes, experiences, families and friendships, and see how it can be brought into poetry, they have a sense of the wide possibilities and the power that they can step into if they choose to. I’m also surprised by how regimented and structured the lives of young people are, from Hamilton to North York to Markham to Newmarket to Parkdale, how much stimulation their days contain and how overwhelmed they are by the emotional and academic demands. For low to middle to high income backgrounds, this is a stressed-out generation. So hopefully, poetry can allow them to feel heard and seen.
Canthius: Your recent thread on Twitter about finding publishers for a manuscript was so useful in demystifying some of the experiences of publishing books. It’s very different from submitting to magazines.
Could you talk about some of the differences you’ve noticed in BIPOC writers publishing (first) books versus white writers?
Phoebe: I’m glad my experiences helped to remove some of the mystery around publishing but I do want to emphasize that I have a limited view, especially as a first-time author and a poet. I could write a essay about this topic. But for now, I will say that despite the orientation and increased focus on diverse voices, BIPOC writers still account for a very small percentage of books published. While there are exceptions, it can take longer for a BIPOC writer to find an editor and publisher who understands the way that their work is positioned in relation to the dominant culture, as it did for me.
When you have a publishing industry that has undergone decades of diminishing sales and funding cuts, the emphasis tends to be towards signing books that will have a wide an audience as possible. On top of that, ideas of what is good literature or a good story or a relatable character is also tied up with Western-centric ideals of literary value and the stories and self-image that are validated and promoted by CanLit wishes. It’s no wonder that if a press or publisher does not actively seek diverse writers, that the default will be a white-identifying writer, not surprising since that the majority of Canada’s readership are white as well.
That correlation between national identity and literary production is now much more understood, so we now see an active seeking out of stories that haven’t yet been told and from previously marginalized voices. Which places another burden of performativity upon BIPOC writers in that they are being asked to fill a gap, to function to uphold CanLit’s self-perception as diverse, resulting in that writer tokenized and/or feeling as though their work is not valued in itself. Poor editing, marketing and promotion is another thing I see happening to BIPOC writers in a publisher’s eagerness to sign diverse authors. When that writer does well despite all the odds stacked against them, there is of course professional envy from other white writers from the strong sales, awards and attention that that writer receives. I know I myself began to question my outward success, internalizing the doubts that surrounded me, that my work was not valued for its own sake but for the sake of the veneer of diversity.
Fortunately for me, I was able to work with two editors who are also women of colour and a publisher that has a track record of publishing diverse writers. I’m also embedded in a community of writers of colour who see the work I do and who continue to champion me. I remember being at an event and having an emerging writer, also of Chinese-Canadian heritage, come up to me and introduce herself, and become a dear friend. I was clearly identifiable in that particular space. I hope that is not a unique experience to writers of colour but I have a feeling it may be.
Canthius: If submitting to magazines is like dating and submitting to book publishers is like job hunting, what is submitting to contests like?
Phoebe: A leap into space! A lottery, where your chances are as good as the strongest poem in the batch. It’s also like a venture, a gamble, maybe like going to the racecourse or to the gym. It’s a long walk where you don’t know what might happen—it could be an uneventful outing, or become something that changes the course of your future. Either way, you left the house and should be proud of yourself.
Canthius: What are you looking for in a winning poem?
Phoebe: I’m looking for any style, any genre. I myself am a lyric poet, but I read and listen to many types of poetry and find beauty and revelation in all kinds: found poetry, spoken word, experimental, formal, minimal, and so on. I look for a poem with a confident sense of the emotional journey it is leading me through, and for poems that hit more than one note.