Hoa Nguyen in Conversation with Kaylea Pham
Hoa Nguyen
Kaylea Pham
This interview was conducted by Kaylea Pham, who provides context for the conversation in the following artist statement:
As part of my Creative Industries undergraduate program and the class “Diversity in the Creative Industries" with researcher Emilie Jabouin, I was given an assignment that called for an informal interview with a creative working person. After some thought, I chose to reach out to Hoa Nguyen whose work I encountered through an online silent auction event called “Stories for PIVOTal Change” in October of 2020. Shortly afterwards, I ordered her chapbook Ask About Language As If It Forgets online from knife | fork | book and within hours of receiving it in the mail, I read all of the poems, multiple times. In the poems I read there, I felt a deep sense of connection, especially in terms of our shared Vietnamese diasporic identity.
Luckily for me, Hoa agreed to my interview request and what follows is one of the most significant and enlightening conversations I’ve had. We spoke for about an hour and what made it so important for me was the fact that it was one of the only times, if not the first, I’d earnestly spoken to someone about what it means to be part of the Vietnamese community and diaspora. Furthermore, it is always a special experience to speak directly with someone whose work I greatly admire.
Ask About Language As If It Forgets by Hoa Nguyen. Photo by Kaylea Pham.
Kaylea: It is March 2, 2022, and I am here with Hoa Nguyen who is a celebrated poet, educator, and facilitator born in the Mekong Delta, raised in the United States, and now lives in Canada. Her published works include Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, and her most recent collection of poetry, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, which garnered critical acclaim and was a finalist for various literature awards.
As I was saying before, I discovered your work in 2020, specifically your chapbook Ask About Language As If It Forgets, and it’s really stuck with me ever since I read it. What strikes me the most about your writing is the vibrant imagery, especially in describing scenes from Vietnam, and its urgency. Of course, your work especially resonated with me as a second-generation child of Vietnamese immigrants who fled Vietnam and came to Canada around 1980.
So, to start, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your career path? When did you start writing and at what point did you decide to pursue it as a career?
Hoa: Well, I don’t really think of poetry as a career. I mean it’s kind of the most absurd choice to make, to claim poetry for a livelihood in a North American context, generally speaking. Unless you have, you know, a trust fund or some other form of personal wealth, which I do not. It really is something that I’ve always been drawn to. I think it was sourced in my fascination with song lyrics and the ability for music and song to be carried, to move people across time, to carry information, to be soulful, to transcend history, to locate oneself in history, to locate oneself in timelessness.
I remember when I was maybe in middle school, maybe sixth grade, something like that. In my public library I found an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in translation. An edition that came out called A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, published in the seventies. I remember the opening sentence to the introduction as saying, “The Vietnamese people have always believed that they are poets.” And I think it sort of released me into a kind of permission, to claim my art as poetry.
I mean, I knew I would need a livelihood, so when I went to undergraduate [studies], I actually didn’t study literature or writing; creative writing wasn’t an offering for undergrads at that time. I took a minor in English and studied psychology with the thought that I would be a therapist and that I might get a Master’s in social work and have my writing be the thing I do for myself, something I do for my own ambitions towards literature. But then I understood after I graduated, when I looked back at my undergraduate experience, that my most buoyant, joyful, and engaged moments were when I was in a poetry workshop—a place where you can interact with poetry, think about it as a writer and produce your own writing, meet with peers in conversation, and so on.
Hoa Nguyen and Linda Diep Lijewski (née Diep Ahn Nguyen) taken some time during their few months upon first settling in North America. Photo by Edward Lijewski, 1968.
I had a poem placed in a college journal at the time, and I realize in retrospect, it made me see that I needed to pursue writing as my focus. And then I was in my later twenties, in that period called your Saturn Return, when the planet Saturn returns to the place in the sky as it was when you were born. It’s a particular moment of reconstruction of the self, so that the things that had constructed the self up to that point then become examined, fall away, are recognized newly. A lot of people experience tremendous intensity around the period of their Saturn Return.
For me, I made that decision to claim poetry as my path. And I just trusted that I could figure out how to make a living, after all I’m the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant woman raised far above her given circumstances, through will and wit and luck and good management.
Kaylea: Amazing. I feel the same about my mom; she’s very inspiring. So, I’ve often heard about, and experienced for myself at times, the feeling of catharsis that can present itself in the process of writing, and that sort of ingrained need to write what cannot be said. Maybe. I wanted to ask what does poetry and writing mean to you, in what ways does it serve you, in what ways do you think you serve it, if at all?
Hoa: Yes, I think that place that you refer to, that heightened state of ‘flow’—where the elements are all sort of arranged in a pattern that you can enter, that you’re not necessarily separate from—it’s there that you know you’re at home. I’ve long been interested in language as my material and how language is pitched towards music, but not as an essayist or novelist, but as a poet. And poetry is a durable form; it’s ancient and as old as language itself, so poetry and language are one in the same. Poets tend to look at the materiality of language.
And yet, that material is also oral, something that can be shared from speaker to listener or from book/object to reader. It can be shared with future readers that you didn’t anticipate or imagine. I find this to be a very liberating space, deeply tied to its own self-examination and self and site of play. I also find poetry liberating for its ability to move across time and space and how it can comment on itself, re-situate, reimagine, and re-narrate. My hope is that my poetry enters in those conversations, into those sites where those relationships around language—which is already in this space of reference—can continue to resound.
Kaylea: I was thinking a lot about the desire to sort of, feel seen and understood by others a lot, and how it must be a really universal feeling even if it can be a vulnerable thing to admit. I listen to a lot of music too and I’ve come to realize that whenever I share either my own art or someone else’s art, like a song with someone, I’m offering them a piece of myself. Does that resonate with you when you publish a poem or share your work with others? Do you consider that as a piece of yourself?
Hoa: Well, I think there’s a way in which when you make things, it is very personalized. You were there at its making, you shaped it. The materials themselves are things that are informed by experience or informed by study, by observation and so on. There is a way in which these objects that we make become personal. And yet, they also form their own organism, right? And have their own social relationships that aren’t really about me anymore. And I think that’s a healthy stance in a certain way, because I think it helps separate you from the objects that you make, so that you can keep making them and it’s not like you’re shredding yourself, or selling off a fingernail (laughs).
Kaylea: And divorcing it from people’s reactions as well, I imagine.
Hoa: Yeah, and I think that it also enriches the perspectives of what you’re making too if it’s not really “me”; it can be free to contain many references, ones that aren’t necessarily solely located in the self, or in a self. It also in a certain way can help represent a self more fully because it becomes a space of porosity, constantly relating and making meaning out of patterns. I think what I thought of when you first formed the question was about how important it is—I think this is why we make it personal, why it feels personal, how important it is to make meaning and shape meaning and share it. Because then the people who are experiencing or interacting with your expression of meaning can inhabit it in these different ways. It’s relational—a very relational proposal.
Kaylea: Maybe this question is a bit similar, but I wanted to ask in what ways does your identity inform your work, in terms of your heritage, gender, place in the world, etc?
Hoa Nguyen and Linda Diep Lijewski (née Diep Ahn Nguyen) taken some time during their few months upon first settling in North America. Photo by Edward Lijewski, 1968.
Hoa: I think that is related because it informs my perspectives intimately. What’s interesting, with our diaspora often the first question of introduction, is where do we fall in relation to historical moments and a sequence of events that are shared and yet unique. And how that marks you, whether or not you want it to. So there’s some tension around that for me also, right, because when one is marked, gendered, marked racially, marked by class, and so on … there can be tension, especially around how you want your work to be read against and with those factors.
So as a maker, it’s interesting because I absolutely see the patterns across my work, like in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, which is the book that incorporates the chapbook poems that you have, or Ask About Language As If It Forgets from Toronto's poetry dispensary knife fork book. When I was putting together Red Juice, a volume that brings together my first two books and an early uncollected work, I realized I’ve always been concerned with inequity, always been looking at structural oppression and environmental collapse. I’ve always been a feminist in my perspectives; I’ve always written poems that reflect these concerns intersectionally.
Those motifs, those perspectives, those concerns have remained strong across my writing—they’ve just taken different expressions. They figure in my thinking, or my poetics, and my stances toward the work I make, and this includes a kind of criticality, what people might call “political” dismissively. I guess that means an orientation towards polis, an orientation to the larger community, which, in my view, includes the more-than human.
Kaylea: So, I think you touched on this as well, but I did want to ask if you felt the pressure to speak for the Vietnamese diasporic experience or do you tend to just write about your lived experience and it just so happens to resonate? I marked down a specific verse from “Transplants”:
and no I don’t want to conduct
My Lai research and produce it
for you
Dear Reader.
It really hit me, like speaking for your community, but it’s not something you always want to do or feel equipped to do, just speaking personally.
Hoa: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a refusal to perform and produce sort of those traumatic violences inside of my own writing. For whose benefit? I think about audience; I think about unnarrated perspectives and of perspectives that tend not to be centered. I think that that’s something I’ve always considered, maybe, but previous to this book, I haven’t racially marked myself, in such a specific way, in such a marked way. Even so, in Red Juice, the first poem in the collection, drawn from my first book Your Ancient See Through, has Buddha in it, which marks in a way, but it doesn’t say, “As a Vietnamese diasporic …”—it just says “Buddha’s ears are droopy / touch his shoulders” (laughs) and “scarves fly out of windows.” It doesn’t really take place in any kind of descriptive reality.
Hoa venerating the tree and the calendula that grew from ceremony. Photo by Keaton Smith in 2021 on the fall equinox.
Kaylea: But still it indicates something…
Hoa: Yes!
Kaylea: Could you say what led you in your most recent work to make you talk about it more, or bring it up more?
Hoa: Previous to Treasure, I had a tendency to write poems from my perspectives, but did not racially mark them specifically. I'm already racially marked, by virtue of my name, but maybe not as much by virtue of the circumstance of acculturation. Because of where I fall in our diaspora, because my mother left Vietnam very early in our diaspora, because I was a toddler raised in the U.S. in the Washington, D.C. suburbs prior to the settlements and communities of diasporic Vietnamese. My mother left all of her family of origin, the few that she had left—and then, after a time, severed those last ties. She claimed her Americanness. Our household was English only and she stopped speaking Vietnamese, had only a couple of Vietnamese diasporic friends in the D.C. area, but you know, everyone’s busy, and sometimes you might not like them. Right? It’s always like—(laughs)—’guess I’ll go hang out with her.’ She’s kinda bossy, I didn’t like her kids, you know whatever.
Kaylea: It’s always something.
Hoa: It’s always something! But more to the point, my mother didn’t identify as a refugee; she left Vietnam to fulfill her relationship as she had married a white American man—and he didn’t have much proficiency in Vietnamese. For me, growing up without the Vietnamese language and as a ‘mixed’ person, I felt a lack of belonging with reference to my Vietnameseness, an estrangement from my own Vietnameseness. It is hard to bring into expression and write into that experience because it is an experience of languagelessness, a word I use, I think, in a poem included in Ask About Language As If It Forgets.
It’s funny, the poet Don Mee Choi, a Korean-American, and a translator of the work of Kim Hyesoon, an amazing Korean national poet—they won the Griffin Prize for Poetry for her translation of Autobiography of Death, which I highly recommend.
Kaylea: I’m gonna write that down.
Hoa: Anyway, Don Mee Choi and I met in Seattle, years ago when I was still working on the book and we talked about diasporic experiences and ghosts and languagelessness: all these things and mothers. The next day, she [Hoa’s mother] shared that she had a dream about me and that I had spoke with an amputated tongue. What an image! And I was like “Oh no!” But it was so accurate in terms of the kind of experience of losing this original language. I was at a developmental age and old enough to have attained the entire blueprint but not the fine motor skills to speak it. No tongue.
I have come to consider that for me being a poet is a way to try to speak to that lost language. Vietnamese is musical, a tonal language, and its musicality is what is part of my attraction to poetry. But then this disconnection between the ability to speak and not speak meant lack of access to modes of expression, a languagelessness, and diasporic rupture. And I also was trying to manage the stereotypical trope of the “tragic mulatto,” to undercut it, even though there is a significant form of loss imprinted on or in my body and forms of cultural dispossession. My mother upon migration from Vietnam cut herself off from community, didn’t have access to it, and adapted and transformed herself. As I note in the poems, she was born in the year of the snake, meaning her ability to transform was tremendous. But as a result, this gap in culture knowledge meant, for me, that I often didn’t feel confident in managing the materials that express “Vietnameseness” because that often felt abstract to me. Even so, my mother’s life had such elements of glamour and badassery that I couldn’t help but want to narrate her story in some fashion. It was both fascinating and unnarrated; my mother wouldn’t barely refer or speak to that era. To undertake A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure meant developing a way for her to tell me things related to that period of her life, for me to ask the right kinds of questions that might help me understand. I also went, finally, to Vietnam for the first time (more than 40 years since I left as a child).
Kaylea: How old were you?
Hoa: It was like, five years ago? Four years ago? 2018. The only reason I really had access to—I mean, you know I’ve always had a job, had children, it’s like I couldn’t just leave—
Kaylea: There’s never enough time.
Hoa: —I have no people there. I thought, how am I gonna make this work? It’s scary to me, emotionally, like thinking about, “I’ll be the tragic mulatto.” (laughs)
Kaylea: Like you’re not Vietnamese, but you’re not like—
Hoa: “I don’t belong anywhere!” Yeah, I didn’t have that experience, but from it I understood, “Oh, yeah, I’m a Westerner.” (laughs)
Kaylea: Yeah, that really resonates, about language and everything, because I myself—my mom was just working a lot when I was at home and then I had siblings, but they spoke to me in English, so there’s a real disconnect. And even now, my Vietnamese is OK, but it’s really at a stage where only my mom could understand me. So, there is that disconnect. I actually noted another part of a poem called “Failed Tower Ca Dao”:
myth and history twist
the theme of exile
into a tower structure
also called “mouth”
that feeling of headlong
the site of mother
my longing in language.
So that for me was really—yeah, the Vietnamese language, it’s hard, it twists your tongue. You know, I tried for a month on Duolingo to get it, but—
Hoa: Did you? How’d it work?
Kaylea: It was OK. But it’s also the accents, the regional accents, which really trip me up. It’s so different from [real life]—you know, I’ll hear my mom listening to her long Vietnamese stories (she’s really into YouTube now) and it just sounds like a whole other language to me, especially their accent.
Hoa: I know, right, that’s part of the frustration. In fact, that’s what motivated me to include in the full manuscript, in the book A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, poems made with extracts from a colloquial Vietnamese language instruction book that I bought in the early nineties with the ambition that I would learn Vietnamese from these cassette tapes. And I started listening to them and thought, “Oh my God, I’ll never learn how to say these words” and then I talked to my mom and she’s like “Yeah, no: that’s a Northern accent.” (laughs)
Kaylea: (laughs) Northern accents, oh man.
Hoa: And I was like, “Well, I don’t want to learn the Northern one and not be able to talk to my mother in my terrible Northern accent.” (laughs)
Kaylea: I’ll move on to this question, which you may have touched on as well. I was wondering what you think of the question or issue of representation. To what extent does it matter to you? Do you think it is really presented in the world of poetry? Is it more of an issue of a lack of diversity or do you think there’s a poet out there for everyone waiting to be found, or waiting to be heard?
Hoa: Gosh, it’s so structural, right? I’ve been a poet all this time, it’s been more than twenty years since my Saturn return, since I took my vow to poetry. It’s interesting to see the shifts that have been made over the decades and I see that there’s been some change—[poetry is] changing faster than the other art forms, maybe, noting how there has been change at institutional levels in, for example, the composition of juries adjudicating for prestigious literary prizes. I recall that Viet Nguyen, for example, was to be on the board of the Pulitzer Prize, and, I believe, the first Asian American to serve there.
Which is to say, institutional gate-keeping places have not been diverse at their highest levels. And certainly growing up, there weren’t Vietnamese and few contemporary Asian diaspora literary models for me. There were actually few women poets as models for me or at least ones that felt sustainable. There was Dickinson, who lived a life of retreat. There’s Sylvia Plath who killed herself—see what I mean?—so I settled on Edna St. Vincent Millay, who from most accounts had a rebellious, joyous life and managed to make money off her poetry. She challenged gender by taking a man’s name as her middle name and had lovers of both genders. I was like: her. I can maybe be like Edna St. Vincent Millay.
So one finds the forms of solidarity or kinship as you can. But that’s kind of sad. Why does it look like that? Why has it taken so long for U.S. Black voices to have the equal platforms and standing as their European / white American counterparts? Asians have been on this continent for a long time and yet, our stories remain unnarrated, not told from our perspectives. That’s troubling.
So I think my orientation towards that issue is to look at what is at foot and how we can place measures in, however stopgap they may be, to at least make sure our juries for literary prizes and grants include a person of colour on them. Because it makes a difference. I’ve seen it in my lifetime as a practitioner. When you have people of colour on a committee making those decisions, the results look really different than if it’s an all-white committee. Similar things happen also in admissions for creative writing programs. And the faculty that teach at universities: how are we teaching the arts? Are diverse perspectives informed by a contemporary point of view?
Kaylea: Curriculum as well, yeah. It really makes me think of another line from “Crow Pheasant”: “Who wants to hear about your Asian North American experience, anyways?” So maybe I could ask, is there any piece of advice you would give to anyone interested in pursuing poetry, who may be hesitant for whatever reason, maybe to do with their identity, or who maybe perhaps is struggling to be heard?
Hoa: I think the best advice is to find a couple of really solid, supportive, creative people to have in your corner, who can inspire you, motivate you, check on you, and see you through the struggles of being an artist. It makes all the difference to have that intimate support. Sometimes people ask, should I go into an arts program? And one could do that. I did; I did make that decision, in part because I felt disconnected from a larger sense of a literary community. And I got lucky by what I found there—but that’s not everyone’s experience either, so enrolling in a graduate program for writing isn’t necessarily a guarantee, but it can help you find people and allows for one to circulate and for the work to circulate and be in conversation with other creatives for mutual support, listening, and making. Other forms of support and circulation, in addition to writing and publishing your own work, include performing acts of curation, interviewing artists, reviewing, translating, organizing a panel or colloquium: these sort of acts can accumulate and help form a larger sense of community and it always begins with simple things like having coffee—
Kaylea: Yeah, yeah, with one or two people. And I was wondering, can you speak about your experiences with teaching and your workshops, which I was reading about. I’d like to ask why you teach, why is it important to you, or something you choose to do?
Hoa: Teaching is one of my callings. I love teaching because it means I get to spend time with poetry and language, my favourite things, and interact there: take it apart with someone else and interact around it. As a curious person who likes to remain in those states of curiosity, teaching means I have the opportunity to participate and also organize information, find and expose patterns of meanings.
More practically, in the creative writing course I teach, I organize workshops as reading-based generative ones rather than a workshop based around providing feedback on participant poems. When I began designing workshops, the latter was the dominant model and I wasn’t keen on that format, so I didn't find it invigorating for my practice. Instead, I was interested in creativity and thinking with poems to make my own, so I created a workshop that I wanted to take, basically, one that I could lead and participate in, so it was a triple win. I got paid, got to study/play, and I got to create a space of literary community and oriented site of engagement. This meant that I also was able to feature work of experimental artists, ones that I cared about who tended not to be the focus of generalized literary study, although they were certainly canonized in other ways, having written in major publications and so forth, but who had, for more aesthetic and other reasons for obscurity, had been less examined or underground. I was able to influence the readership of these constellations of poets and I’m seeing now that this reflects a curatorial temperament that I have. I think I would’ve been a really good “influencer” (laughs), if that was around in my twenties.
Kaylea: I mean, there’s still a chance.
Hoa: I’ll be an older influencer. (laughs)
Kaylea: OK, second-last question: what are you working on now, if anything?
Hoa: Well, my book came out during the pandemic—April marks a year since A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was released. In addition to teaching, presenting, and appearing for the book, my creative life has been expressed primarily as part of a collaborative group that I’m a part of called “She Who Has No Masters,” which is an organization that’s a part of DVAN, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network. We have just launched our first one-on-one mentorship program between Vietnamese diasporic writers. I’m one of four mentors this year, in the first iteration. The collaborative She Who Has No Masters is a collective made up of changing membership, specific to creative projects. Over the pandemic, I’ve participated in a piece that was called “Would That” with Diana Khoi Nguyen, another diasporic Vietnamese poet in the U.S., creating body-text pieces after Diana Khoi Nguyen’s book Ghost Of. Each member of the collective offered a photographic image from personal archives toward this project. Copies of these photos were made and together over Zoom we ceremonially cut out one of the figures from the picture. We also collaborated in Google Docs with text and then Diana merged the vacant space—the image we had redacted—and replaced it with language. These were featured in the George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery in Salt Lake City and a selection appeared in the online journal Hush, and the fall 2021 issue of Poetry magazine.
I also collaborated with She Who Has No Masters in a video project for a conference of Asian American studies as part of a panel “Ecological Sounds of the Vietnamese Diaspora.” For it we each contributed video and text and then Dao Strom brilliantly edited these together for a several-channel video with text, audio, and sound with music, voice, ambient sounds and elements that joined our pieces together: the colour yellow and element of water.
Tree shrine in a pear tree in Greektown. Photo by Keaton Smith in 2021 on the spring equinox.
I submitted a video that I had my son take of me making a tree shrine after that tradition of making and decorating a tree with a little incense and offerings on the spring equinox. Staged nine days after the Atlanta Spa shootings, it was an offering not just for the abundance of earth and trees but also for restless spirits; a ritual of cultural significance to address violence and trauma aftermath. It should be noted that March 16, the day of the killings in Atlanta, was also the anniversary of the My Lai massacre.
Instead of a banyan tree in Vietnam, the shrine was made around the mature pear tree growing in my Ontario backyard and a little Buddha statuette at the base of the tree, one that I’ve had forever and is now falling apart. The video is also spliced in a recording of a poem that’s in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, sourced in that colloquial language book, on the tones in the Vietnamese language, using the syllable ma. And because I’m so self-conscious about my speaking Vietnamese, I asked Ocean Vuong if he would say the tones for me, a recording made years ago, before he became so famous, when I was first writing towards the book. I should mention that I’d begun writing toward A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure in 2012 and then set it aside to write my fourth book Violent Energy Ingots. I went on to finish A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure over the period of my mother’s prolonged illness and subsequent passing, meaning that the poems were informed by and influenced by these events in that I was often visiting, staying with, and caring for her during her long illness. So, the tree shrine also honours her spirit and the spirits of my ancestors and is a site of continuance and commemoration.
Kaylea: All right, so last question. Is there any poetry from another writer that you have recently read that really resonated with you or that you want to highlight?
Hoa: Well, I think I’ve said several in the course of talking. (laughs)
Kaylea: That’s true, that’s true.
Hoa: I’m always reading poetry, that’s the thing. It’s sort of hard to even—
Kaylea: Pick one, for sure.
Hoa: I’m also asked to write blurbs for poetry, so I’m also reading manuscripts of books that are coming out. I just got a copy of a book that I blurbed for Joss Charles who’s a U.S. poet living in California now. I mentioned Diana Khoi Nguyen’s book and Don Mee Choi [he’s amazing]. I love all of my pressmates on Wave Book, the publisher of my full-length books. As you can see [holds up a copy of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure], their books all have these cool typographic covers.
Tyehimba Jess’ Olio, which won the Pulitzer a few years ago, remains a favourite, and is terrific to teach with. I am also a fan of creative non-fiction and I spent early pandemic days reading about mushrooms. I think everyone was reading Entangled by Merlin Sheldrake and everyone was reading Braiding Sweetgrass, which is by Robin—
Kaylea: Robin Wall Kimmerer, I think? I’ve been halfway through it for a while. I always mean to finish it.
Hoa: Yeah, same. I feel like that counts as reading, though. I like to be a completionist around tasks, but with reading, I feel it can be a woven experience. It doesn’t have to be straight through. A book that I read straight through was Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Have you read that?
Kaylea: I haven’t.
Hoa: It’s a memoir cultural critical book; a really great piece of creative nonfiction and it highlights the work of Korean-American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work Dictee that came out in the eighties, remains this moment in Asian American literature that continues to create ripples. Cha calls it a novel, but it’s a hybrid work and is concerned with storytelling that does not follow Western standards.
In fact, Ocean Vuong, in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he names Dictee as one of his texts that he had to read to write his novel. He writes about it in an essay titled “The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel,” in which he is specifically interested in form and how to disrupt the dominant modes of narrative. I’m deeply interested in this as well—and is part of what I was up to in the making of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. You can hear it most specifically in the poem “Mexico” that you read in the chaplet.
Kaylea: I definitely see that. Well, I think that’s all I have for you. Thank you so much.
Hoa: You’re welcome.
Kaylea: I said this would be short but—
Hoa: Well, we got to talking and it got too interesting.
Kaylea: Yeah, thank you for being so generous with your time, for sure. My mind feels expanded right now.
Hoa Nguyen Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998 - 2008 and the Griffin Prize nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is the winner of the Canada Book Award and finalist for a 2021 National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award for Poetry among other notices of merit. Hoa serves as a Visiting Practitioner for Toronto Metropolitan University and is associated with several writing programs including the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College.
Kaylea Pham is a student at Toronto Metropolitan University, currently studying in the Creative Industries program. She is interested in music, film, visual arts, reading, going to concerts, and cooking.