Literary MagNet: Sara Lippmann

Since the rise of European empires, BIPOC writers around the world have created a strong legacy of literary works that resist a Euro-American aesthetic of “good” storytelling. In more recent history, with the institutionalization of writing in the United States, or the MFA—one of the country’s fastest growing graduate degrees, a key incubator of winners of the most prestigious literary awards, and, slowly but surely, a global pedagogical export—American literary culture has developed its distinctive trademark, full of silent assumptions and legitimizing power toward what constitutes good storytelling. 

I spoke with three writers—Felicia Rose Chavez, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Matthew Salesses—who have been very vocal about how this literary scene has stifled historically oppressed writers, especially via the writing workshop, and of ways to decolonize art-making. Chavez and Salesses recently published books on the subject, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Haymarket Books, 2021) and Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (Catapult, 2021), respectively, and Nguyen has critiqued the workshop in pieces such as his 2017 op-ed for the New York Times, “Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile.” Through his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), and its 2021 sequel, The Committed, both anticolonial fiction about American and French empires, Nguyen also circles back to that BIPOC legacy of storytelling that proactively questions what one is taught within a traditional American writing workshop.

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Haymarket Books, 2021) and coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020). Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as the Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access and add to a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color, visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in the United States. He is the author of The Committed (Grove Press, 2021), which continues the story of The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes. He is the editor of the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (Abrams, 2018), and also the author of the story collection The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017) and the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea. He is the author of, among other titles, the PEN/Faulkner finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020), the best-sellers Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021) and The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015), and two forthcoming books from Little, Brown. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University.

Namrata Poddar: All of you have compared U.S. workshops in creative writing to a form of colonization, a “literary imperialism” [Salesses] that’s spreading abroad, a primer in “how power propagates and conceals itself” [Nguyen]. With a fixation on elements of “craft” like “show, don’t tell,” style, point of view, conflict, and an “apolitical writing” that camouflages a politics of white masculinity—more specifically, cis, straight, able, upper or middle class, Western, Judeo-Christian—you’ve reiterated how most U.S. workshops perpetuate a “politics of domination” meant to “dehumanize, pacify, assimilate, and control people of color” [Chavez]. Other writers have also talked or written about craft and a white imperial politics of American writing workshops for a while now; these include Junot Díaz, Claudia Rankine, David Mura, Bich Minh Nguyen, Gish Jen, Joy Castro, and, um, me. Since you teach creative writing as well, do you see a change in the way writing is taught in the United States including MFA programs? Or is change restricted to the role BIPOC gatekeepers play within these overwhelmingly white literary spaces? As important, what does change look like for you as we talk now, in 2021?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I actually don’t teach “creative writing,” also a term that I do not like, since the “creative” seems redundant or overexplaining, and aren’t we as writers supposed to avoid the unnecessary and too explicit? My reluctance to lead writing workshops stems from my distrust of that form of pedagogy—see Flannery O’Connor, Iowa graduate, on the workshop as “composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite”—and my belief that perhaps writing can be taught otherwise. I do supervise writers at the undergraduate and graduate level when it comes to theses and dissertations, whether that is poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. When it comes to writing I prefer a pedagogy that is one-on-one, since writing is by nature so idiosyncratic and individual. If writers want to think about shared problems, challenges, and techniques, there are plenty of books and essays that talk about them, as you point out. If “BIPOC gatekeepers” exist, and I suppose they do, then they are also part of the problem if they think of their function as opening a gate. The conventional literary world, from professionalized creative writing to the publishing industry, functions through a series of gates, and we have to live in the world as it is, but we should also be thinking about the world as it could be. A world without gates and gatekeepers. So while we need BIPOC faculty and role models, hopefully they are not just pragmatic and accepting of a system of professional and aesthetic exclusion and narrowness, but are interested in knocking down gates and eroding genre conventions, including the conventions of the genre of literary fiction. Change today does include the books by Felicia and Matt and David Mura that bring attention to how the writing workshop operates, but change also comes from outside the “overwhelmingly white literary spaces.” I think of small presses and community arts organizations and online writing, including Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and its blog, diacritics.org, all of which I am involved with or helped start, in reaction to the norms of whiteness in mainstream publishing and literature. We have to make our own change, collectively, as well as imagine how we, individually, as writers can challenge conventional aesthetics. 

Matthew Salesses: I can’t say what’s happening within other MFA programs, but I can say that there probably wouldn’t have been a need for Craft in the Real World if change was happening at the pace it should be. I wouldn’t have had to write it, I mean. Everything Viet is saying seems right to me. I’ve been trying to do the thing that I can do, to contribute the thing that I can contribute, which is write and teach writing and write about writing and teaching writing. I do teach workshops, though, and I think it’s pedagogically useful if we challenge how power usually operates in a workshop. I think the problem is this idea of leading. The workshop can potentially be a real place of possibility, an imaginative opportunity, if the writer isn’t being led.

Felicia Rose Chavez: Change is coming. I believe that. It’s a matter of confessing to and pushing past fear. I facilitate these anti-racist pedagogy workshops with MFA faculty across the country, and we talk about what scares us. Because no matter our desire to avoid replicating harm, change is risk. It necessitates that we name how we reinforce individual, institutional, and internalized racism in each and every one of our classrooms. We all play gatekeeper in one way or another. I tell teachers the same thing I tell myself: “Break the silence. You are contributing to the conversation for the love of your students. Speak up when you need to speak up. Do it to be free of the fear of what will happen when you release the truth.” To reorient from passive to active behavior—to be actively anti-racist—we have to exercise risk. What if my (white) department chair doesn’t approve of an anti-racist pedagogy? What if my (white) students don’t accommodate an anti-racist pedagogy? Enough with holding ourselves accountable to white supremacy! Academia breeds it, normalizes it—hierarchy, authority, ego, control—whiteness as neutral and objective. But Adrienne Marie Brown teaches us that art is not neutral, that it either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. It’s up to all of us, not just our faculty of color, to pry our fingers off the gates of literacy. Instead, let’s take risks for the sake of progress, exposing art’s roots of race, power, privilege. Let’s say it aloud: “I teach an anti-racist workshop.” Let’s talk openly with our students about our pedagogical choices—a reorientation from authority over our students to ally to our students, from speaking at them to listening to them, from valuing a high-stakes final product to nurturing a healthy working process. Let’s involve them in our course content creation and then step back and access together: How might we adapt, moving forward? In doing so, we model real learning in real time: uncertainty, experimentation, growth, and change. 

Poddar: I agree with all you have shared here on the system and ways of getting past it. To linger a bit on this notion of gatekeeping, though, the heads of Big Five publishing houses—now Big Four—are white, as are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books in U.S. publishing. After twenty years of working toward decolonizing literature in my writing and teaching, and practicing the same within my forthcoming debut novel, I remember the challenges in finding a home for my book in the United States, the countless “encouraging rejections” alongside nominations for literary awards. I feel very lucky to have found a home for my fiction with an indie press run by Asian American editors, although like many smaller presses, the advance I was offered here is nominal. I share this as it’s too familiar a story for many fresh-off-the-MFA debut writers from marginalized communities. My question then: How do you teach BIPOC to practice a nonwhite craft of writing and equip them to publish within a market that’s decisively white, without students giving away their labor of years for free?  

Nguyen: I think we can teach BIPOC—and white—students to recognize aesthetic norms that are dictated or heavily influenced by whiteness and to try and write differently. That’s within our power as individual teachers. But I’m not sure how to answer the second part of your question about surviving as a writer. The options seem to range from limited to bad—become a creative writing teacher or find a paying job with writing as yet another job—but I’m wondering if there was ever a time when things were different for writers who were not wealthy or privileged. The burden is worse for BIPOC writers in a white publishing world, of course. For this reason I don’t see the problems you indicate as being much different from other pressing problems, from discriminatory police violence to prisons overcrowded with people of color and the poor to a faulty education system that is deeply unequal. Short-term solutions to any of these problems are actually not solutions, since these problems exist in a web of inequality produced from centuries of racial, class, and gendered exploitation and division. Unless we as a society can address systemic inequity, we can’t solve local inequity, including the inequity of how writers and artists are treated. This is why, for me, writing and everything around it is inherently political in practice, and often political in aesthetic, whether that is an acceptable, implicit politics that doesn’t announce itself as politics—and accepts the unequal world as it is—or an explicit politics that will be demeaned by those who believe that art should not be political because they benefit from the implicit politics of an unequal world. I equip myself for the situation you describe by making my writing as political as I can and by imagining myself as a writer within a genealogy of literary, cultural, and political struggle, including Asian American writers and the Asian American movement, Black writers and Black efforts for emancipation and liberation, and decolonizing thinkers, writers, artists, activists, and revolutionaries all across the world. Thinking of myself in relation to this genealogy and network, thinking of my writing as existing not only in a white-defined literary world, but in a world outside of the text, a world struggling for justice and freedom, empowers me and lets me know that I am not alone and that I am not defined by white people invested in their own whiteness. Instead, I stand in relation to all kinds of people who see the relation between art and politics and the importance of solidarity to overcome the false divisions designed to drive us apart and weaken our efforts to decolonize. 

Salesses: I agree that the first part is what we’ve been working toward in craft essays and books—how to recognize where the “craft” we are taught comes from and whom it serves, where the money comes from, and then how to reorient toward speaking to and within a literary history and tradition that actually serves us and our stories and our audiences—and I also agree that the second part is a systemic issue. Equipping students to actually get their work published within this system—it’s about equipping students to do work in the real world to resist the system and take it down. I guess that’s what Viet already said. I think the way this often gets spun, though, is to make it about our feelings. Like: We should get used to rejection, toughen up, have thicker skin, etc. We do have to deal with our feelings, of course, but I think we can do more to give our students some practical help to deal with the system itself, like connecting them with BIPOC agents and editors, reminding them that it takes only one agent, one editor, and teaching them that audience is specific and that they don’t need to write for everyone. 

Chavez: White hegemony aims to erase, capitalism aims to exploit, and yet we exist, still we thrive. Richard Jean So points to the dominance of white narcissism in the publishing industry, the pervasive racial inequality that’s staunchly anti-Black. And so we build it ourselves, just like we’ve always done. I start by teaching my students to listen to themselves. In my book I give it a name: a pedagogy of deep listening. I might coin the outcome as confidence. To start, students tune inward to confront their psychological and emotional relationships to writing, naming fear, perfectionism, competition, jealousy, and a belief in their own worthlessness as everyday barriers to creativity. We speak these unspeakable things aloud. Too often writers feel alone in their private suffering. Together we affirm that our inner critic is nothing more than fear. Name it and move on. Students tune inward again, this time to summon their mentors as guide. Allow them to love what they love, honor that genealogy that Viet speaks of, invite it into the classroom, legitimize it. In my workshop students craft sculptural “family trees,” tributes to their artistic lineage. I ask, “How might you extend the moves of your mentors?” Finally, students tune inward to write artist statements, tracking their writing process, articulating craft-based questions to guide discussion of their work, and communicating a vision for future drafts. In listening to themselves again and again, students cultivate artistic intuition. They grow into their own ideal reader. They write to please themselves. They workshop so as to witness themselves what needs fixing. When a peer, a professor, an agent, or an editor questions their moves on the page, I want them to be so emboldened as to own their words. No, you cannot use me, tokenize me, reject and destroy me. No, you cannot supersede control and manipulate my voice on the page to sound like you. No, thank you, this partnership is unhealthy. “Tune inward and listen to yourselves, trust yourselves,” I tell my students, so that they might go on to serve as their own authority. It’s a long game, but our publishing allies are out there, they’re growing day by day, just look to Roxane Gay’s imprint. In the meantime: Write for you, your mentors, your ancestors.

Poddar: I love how you’re all pointing here, in different ways, to knowing one’s lineage and reader as key elements of craft. Although knowing this well is one of the biggest challenges, too, I think, especially for writers who come from a legacy of white colonial rule—meaning, for about 90 percent of the planet that was colonized by Europe by the early 1900s—that brutally erased and supplanted native languages and cultures with white ones. Add to it writers who come from multiple histories of imperial rule (white and nonwhite), hetero-patriarchy, caste hegemony, and other reasons we’ve mentioned above, and we have lineages that can get even more fragmented and paradoxical when not erased. So I’m curious what this journey of discovery was like for you. From your earliest efforts to write for an audience to your work today, when did you know your lineage and your reader?

Nguyen: I have multiple lineages, and I don’t think that’s problematic. I grew up immersed in the Anglo-American canon as found in the public library and my Catholic school education, and I loved the classics of English and American literature, even if, in retrospect, I can identify how much of these traditions could also be classified under what Edward Said called “culture and imperialism.” Being steeped in these classics gave me a rich sense of the English language and a sense of Anglo-American and Western European literary history that was deepened by my time doing a PhD in English at UC Berkeley. That was a conservative program that had heavy historical requirements from Beowulf onward through Chaucer and Shakespeare and the Romantics and the Victorians and the American Renaissance and so forth. It wasn’t always fun to read the works in this tradition, but I’m glad I did, because it is my tradition, too, even as it is a tradition that resists me and rejects me. I believe that writing is fighting, like Ishmael Reed said, and the deeper and wider in literary traditions a writer is versed, the more equipped the writer is for such a task. I wrote The Sympathizer with an eye toward how that novel could be situated in relation to this canonical tradition. But I also write with other lineages. The so-called genres of detective, crime, and spy writing. And most important, the writings of U.S. peoples of color and the decolonizing writers from around the world, as well as the philosophers and theorists of these writings and of colonized experiences. Encountering Black, Asian American, and decolonizing and theoretical writing at Berkeley was especially crucial in making me understand what was lacking in the Western tradition and that my task was not to fill in that gap—not to claim a space for representation and inclusion—but to demonstrate how that tradition was built on power and, when it came to people like me, exploitation and conquest. All of this animates The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed. I believe it’s possible and necessary to borrow and steal from dominant culture—which borrowed and stole from the peoples it conquered—and to speak from the perspective of one’s own community at the same time. Finally, not just to speak from that perspective, but to speak first and foremost to…who? For me, my first reader is me. But the second reader or readers are people like me. People to whom I do not need to translate. Everyone else can listen in.

Chavez: When I was a little girl, I had this diary that I sealed in a ziplock bag and buried underground. I’d dig it up when I wrote, then bury it again in hot New Mexico dirt when I was done. Stories were in the air all around me—family members talking and talking over afternoon coffee at the kitchen counter, rancheros blasting from the garage—and yet I had this terror of sharing my own words. Reading was no relief. The page was white space: Publishers, authors, characters, even the teachers who pointed me to my beloved texts, were all white. I remember one of those white teachers recommended me to a summer writing camp when I was in seventh grade. I worked on this nonfiction project for weeks, only to be told that my characters’ grammar was incorrect, that “no one sounds like this, it’ll never get published.” Too many years later, I found Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo and June Jordan and Cherrie Moraga and Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks and Rosario Castellanos and Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldúa and Donna Kate Rushin. Their writing spoke to my writing, said it was okay to sound like me. And the students at Young Chicago Authors, too, where I served as teaching artist in the early 2000s, exposed me to stories in the air, not secret and suffocated underground, but spoken word, vibrating with the language of home. Hip-hop, essentially. When I wrote my own book, I knew I had to step up, speak up, lean into the swag of my people. I consider The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop a memoir. It reflects on myself as writer and student and looks toward the future as writer and teacher: What sounds do our words make when we’re allowed to love what we love, and how do we extend that same love to ourselves? 

Salesses: Like Felicia, I lived and am living the change from telling stories for the white gaze, engaging with white expectations, including about and to myself, to telling stories that reach beyond or apart from those expectations. Who your reader is, what your lineage is, is about what expectations you’re working with and why. For a long time I was writing toward expectations of what success could mean for me within a white literary landscape—how to write the kind of story that is easily consumable by white readers and how to accept and even prize that consumption as acceptance. Eventually it wasn’t even self-awareness that saved me; it was realizing that my writing was doing nothing in this space. I remember I had written yet another essay explaining the transracial adoptee experience for white people, and my own white adoptive father commented on my Facebook wall that he had read the essay and still didn’t see me as any different from him; he didn’t see my difference, which is to say my life. The essay was literally about recognizing difference as a kind of definition. If my writing couldn’t even do something for the audience of my own parents, then it was doing nothing at all. Readers create meaning. I wanted, and still want, my writing to do something in the real world, and doing something is about doing it within a certain context and for certain people. After that I made a conscious decision to write for adoptees instead.

Poddar: Lastly, all of you have written or edited in more than one form of writing—fiction, nonfiction, poetry. When it comes to innovation or pushing against established conventions within your work, is there a form you prefer over another? Why?  

Nguyen: I love fiction first and foremost because it’s through fiction that I became entranced by the power of the word and saved by it. As a young, lonely refugee with no books in his house, no friends, and parents too busy struggling to survive to spend time with me, I would have died a spiritual death if it hadn’t been for the public library and the world of fiction within it. I tried to write poetry, and I was terrible at it, but I loved poetry at a young age, and I can appreciate everything from Shakespeare and the Romantics to what so many powerful poets are doing today. Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony come to mind. What the poets do with language and form, typography and white space, rhythm and sound, language and the refusal to translate is absolutely crucial to how I write fiction and try to push against conventions there. As for nonfiction, The Sympathizer and The Committed are novels written in the guise of nonfiction, as confessions. That liberated me to do a lot of things that realist novels aren’t supposed to do, like telling and showing at the same time, rather than “show, don’t tell,” a perfectly decent literary tactic that has become a dogmatic mantra of the writing programs that too often justifies aesthetic and ideological conservativeness. Deploying poetry and nonfiction against the normalized constraints of mainstream contemporary American fiction has been absolutely important to me. 

Chavez: I’m of the school that all forms are one form: story. That goes for history, science, politics, and pedagogy as well as poetry, plays, lyrics, and prose. Whether it’s in the classroom or on the page, I draw inspiration from across the storytelling spectrum: queer feminist theory alongside a breakbeat play alongside Susie Yang and Jamila Woods. My students know this well, as the whole point of my course The Inspiration Lab is to shake off our reliance on authority to assign pages. Let’s do it ourselves! Let’s seek out our own inspiration and make the weird hybrid stuff that we want to enjoy. In my own practice I’ve experimented with digital collage, graphic essay, and audio storytelling. I’ve adapted comic books and news stories into nonfiction that reads as fiction, social media threads into experimental podcast scripts. Sure, Robert Frost’s cool and all, but what’s now, what’s new, what’s relevant to me? People of color have long been innovating, taking risks. Our daily survival is an act of imagination, from the way we code-switch to the way we hustle to the way we peace-make. Kiese Laymon is on point when he wonders “what Black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.” I’m dying to know too.

Salesses: It’s exhausting to try to sound smart here. Maybe what our answers speak to is that breaking down expectations is also about expectations of genre, separations between genres, etc. I prefer fiction. I like to read fiction. Fiction is already about resisting official narratives, or at least it is in some cultures. But there’s a lot of nonfiction and poetry like that too. Personally, I like the challenge of making everything up and the reminder that even then the symbols I’m using to build something make-believe already have received meanings of their own. How do you resist even the tools of your own resistance and the things you create with those tools? It’s like trying to make air out of Lego pieces. 

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as interviews editor for Kweli, and teaches literature as well as creative writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Literary Hub, Longreads, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. She holds a PhD in French studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Find her on Twitter, @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram, @writerpoddar.

In late 2016, adoptee poet and Kundiman fellow Leah Silvieus initiated a research project about the ways in which emerging adoptee poets contend with identity, loss, culture, and family in their work. She sent a query through the Kundiman network, looking for Asian American adoptees who would be interested in participating, and the three of us—Tiana Nobile, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and Ansley Moon—eagerly responded. 

To be in community with not only fellow transracial, transnational, Asian American adoptees, but also poets was incredibly meaningful. We quickly realized that navigating the world as transracial, transnational adoptees and sharing a deep affinity with language in turn made our relationships with one another particularly affirming. This initial meeting led to us forming an adoptee book club. Marci had just read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017) and wanted to talk about the book’s adoption narrative. From there we read more books written by both adoptees and non-adoptees, all featuring prominent adoptee characters. We began to notice recurring tropes that reflected problematic understandings of the adoptee experience, including the white savior and the insistence on reunification as a solution to all problems. In reading, processing, and critiquing in conversation together, we have been able to develop a unique analysis of these narratives, grounded in our own adoptee experience. It is an analysis and perspective that we think is too often excluded from mainstream literary discourse.

In 2019 the three of us presented a panel at the New Orleans Poetry Festival about our book club and the significance of building community and finding kinship among fellow adoptees of color. Poet, friend, and Kundiman executive director Cathy Linh Che attended the conference and stayed with Tiana. The night after the panel, over crawfish and sangria, she asked if we had thought about starting a collective. At that point it hadn’t crossed our minds, though we were already functioning like one. Cathy insisted that we should, that our voices and stories mattered. Her encouragement was the push we needed to make it official.

Since that panel, we have continued to meet and support one another’s work. Most recently, in April 2021, we celebrated the publication of Tiana Nobile’s debut poetry collection, Cleave, at a reading hosted by Kundiman that featured a lineup of luminary adoptee writers, including Silvieus, Sun Yung Shin, and Matthew Salesses. Now we are thrilled to announce the launch of our adoptee and artist collective, the Starlings Collective, with a mission to honor the experiences and elevate the work of African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA) adoptee writers and artists through public events, workshops, and more. Adoption is a global phenomenon that is informed by the intersections of multiple systems of power, including white supremacy, sexism, ableism, war, and colonialism. Erasure and displacement are inherent in adoption stories, and there is no singular adoptee narrative. We aim to elevate and deepen the breadth of adoptee narratives. By interrogating the ways in which mainstream adoptee narratives reflect broader understandings of adoptee identity and shape policy, we consider the consequences such depictions have on social and political institutions. 

We inhabit different corners of the world: Brooklyn, New York; New Orleans; and Miami. Over the course of the summer of 2021—with some help from Zoom and Google Docs—we met and discussed questions we posed to ourselves about writing, survival, and community. 

Arrivals for adoptees are complicated. However you’d like to reply, how did you arrive?
Nobile: I arrived on a plane. I arrived in the arms of a stranger. I arrived when I was six months old mysteriously dressed in multiple layers of clothes, several onesies fitted to my tiny body. I arrived at JFK’s International Terminal in Queens, New York, via Seoul, via Daejeon, South Korea. Twenty-one years later, I arrived in New Orleans in a red 2005 Mazda Tribute. I arrived to this friendship after years of flailing, of searching for mooring without an anchor. I arrive to this conversation with an open heart and a belly full of gratitude.

Cancio-Bello: Tiana, your response makes me think of your poem “Revisionist History.” I arrived in the world long before I arrived in America. Though I do not know my own origin story, I did not begin in an airport, so I must constantly revise what I imagine my earliest arrivals to be. In this way I am always arriving. In some ways, too, I am perpetually departing.

Moon: I arrived as a question. A daughter departed. Armful of bangles and a white dress. I’ve been thinking about how the word arrive comes from the French word arriver, meaning to reach the end of a long journey. Like you, Marci, I am always arriving and departing. Writing, too, feels like a series of arrivals and departures. 

In a March 2021 op-ed in Time, prolific writer and adoptee Nicole Chung wrote, “I lived every day from the age of 7, when I heard my first slur from a classmate, understanding that my Korean face made me hypervisible where we lived—and that it could also make me a target.” What is your earliest memory of race? 
Nobile: Like Nicole, my earliest memories of experiencing racism took place at school. In first grade, a boy with hair so blond it was almost white and a face full of freckles ching-chonged at me over the bus seats. It was then that I realized people perceived my body differently than the rest of my family. I went home and told my mother, who told his mother, who made him apologize. 

He was also very young, and I remember when he apologized, he had a confused look on his face. Now, having spent over a decade working with children, I doubt that he knew why what he said was harmful and was most likely parroting something he had heard directed at bodies that looked like mine. Also being six years old, I don’t think I knew why it hurt me, either; it just did. Regardless, he intuitively knew it was a way to hold something over me, to humiliate and assert power. For me, the moment imprinted, and my body began to harden.

That was my first overt experience with being racialized; however, in retrospect, there are earlier memories, like my family calling my likewise-adopted brother “Buddha boy.” When I learned the word microaggression in college, I realized I had been collecting them for years in my memory’s arsenal, without any space to release or process. I was a tightly wound ball of anxiety and self-loathing, which made me an easy target.

Moon: Tiana, your early experiences resonate so deeply with me, as does your comment about holding and processing these racist encounters solo. I’m so sorry that this happened, and I wish that I could have been on that bus with you. 

In many ways I find this question the hardest to answer because growing up, in my adoptive family, I was the only nonwhite person. It was a lonely place, especially because I felt so profoundly different, and no one else in my family experienced the world like I did. 

When we moved from a suburb of Atlanta to the North Georgia area, I remember how being different turned dangerous. I went from being around other nonwhite children to being one of only a few nonwhite people around. Small children would gape and point at my brown body. Strangers would stop and interrogate me: “What are you?” A white boy told me I smelled because I was brown and dirty; meanwhile, his friend would drag his finger slowly across his throat and laugh each time he saw me. 

One day, when my family and I were out grocery shopping, we saw the KKK march in our town. My mother was forced to pull over, and she quickly instructed me to hide in the back seat. My body, it seemed, was always a target, always in jeopardy. Another time I recall being tied to a pole and abandoned by three white boys who I thought were my friends. As the bell rang, several classes let out to find me screaming. I remember a white teacher telling me it was my fault. What saddens me most about these experiences is that I navigated them alone because I did not  know how to share them with my family. 

Cancio-Bello: Ansley and Tiana, I’m so sorry you had to go through these horrible experiences alone. I wish I could have been there with you both. I don’t remember a time when I was not hyperaware of being racialized, though I grew up extremely isolated. As homeschooled kids in an Appalachian hamlet, my brother and I were the only nonwhite people for miles. We did not even interact with other children our age, except in monthly church gatherings, though I remember being locked in a church nursery by some older girls who told me to wait until my “real parents” came back for their “Asian princess.” 

My adoptive parents were obsessed with Asian culture and often spoke of me and to me in the language of commodity. In my earliest memories my adoptive mother exoticized my “china doll lips” to strangers who asked “what” I was. They told me several times that they had wanted to adopt from China, but by the time they had saved enough money, it was much easier to get babies from South Korea. In a house where being noticed was dangerous, I always felt like a target to my own adoptive parents. I don’t think their racialization was conscious, but when in recent years I’ve tried to have conversations about race with them, they said it hadn’t occured to them that I might have experienced racism and were not interested in talking about it.

As adoptees it might be useful to separate racism from loved ones and racism from strangers. They are different forms of pain in which a racialized experience is compounded by the ignorance and indifference of loved ones who look like the initial perpetrators. For example, in the early months of the pandemic, friends and family spoke incredulously about the violent hate crimes against Asian Americans, only to be surprised that I didn’t leave the house for four months. I was not, in their minds, Asian—or at least Asian enough—to be in danger. This makes me wonder what your experiences with racial violence have been as adults, both before and then during the pandemic.

Moon: Marci, I appreciate this question. I, too, have had similar conversations with family members when I asserted that they see me as a queer South Asian person. Why is it that others are so threatened by our bodies, our existence? Violence against my body isn’t new. I am reminded how radical it is to write, to exist. 

To answer the last part of your question, I feel very fortunate that I was able to work remotely for most of the pandemic. However, as the world pushes to “reopen,” what can we do to keep each other safe? 

Nobile: Ansley, it makes me so sad to hear about your early experiences growing up in North Georgia. That your body was ever treated with anything less than care infuriates me, and I, too, wish I had been there for you on the playground. My experiences with violence have often been tied to the sexual objectification of my body. I’ve had my vagina grabbed while walking down the street. Another time, a group of teenage boys yelled “Chinese pussy!” out of their car windows before cackling and speeding off. I have so many stories like this. My experience with the exoticization of the Asian body preceded my knowing there was a word for it. During the pandemic I didn’t expect to feel so comforted by the quiet safety of being tucked in my home. I’m incredibly fortunate to have been able to stay home during such a tumultuous time, but your question, Marci, makes me think about what else we might need to seek refuge from, particularly with the rise in anti-Asian violence over the last year and a half.

As an adoptee, what does it mean to survive? To write?
Cancio-Bello: Tiana, your book actually addresses a lot of what it means for adoptees to survive in many versions of that word. Speaking of microaggressions from loved ones, so much is revealed in the title and first line of your poem “Did you know”: “my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?” Personal documentation shifts in the second part to adoptees in the news. How many people know of the Vietnamese babies lost in 1975 when the first plane crashed in “Operation Babylift,” as described so heartbreakingly in your poem of the same name? And your poem “The Last Straw” guts me every time, with its epigraph: “U.S. woman put adopted Russian son on one-way flight alone back to homeland. —NY Post headline, 9 April 2010.” I read an early version of your manuscript around the time news circulated of YouTube celebs Myka and James Stauffer “rehoming” their adopted son, Huxley, and I wondered if, given another year or two, what other poems you might have written and added to Cleave. 

While many of us have survived into adulthood in the most literal sense, I wonder how much of ourselves has survived intact along the way. Adoptee activists have pointed out how similar the adoption industry is to human trafficking. Children are still being bought, kidnapped, or tricked from their families. Adult adoptees have been deported because their adoptive families did not or would not finalize their naturalization paperwork. There is still somehow opposition to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 and the Adoptee Citizenship Acts of 2019 and 2021. We are too often expected to feel “grateful” (read also: subservient, controllable) for being told we are secondhand and second-choice. It is no wonder adoptees are four times more likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees. 

What then can survival really look like for adoptees? My poet-sister E. J. Koh has a stunning essay in Catapult in which she says, “If there was value in any life on earth, then value must be present in mine. If I believed in this one thing, I could write freely. I learned to know my life as valuable.” Anger helped me to survive. Writing has taught me how to love and see my life as valuable.

In his revolutionary book Craft in the Real World, fellow adoptee Matthew Salesses speaks of writing as power. He writes, “What we call craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations. … How we engage with craft expectations is what we can control as writers. … These expectations are never neutral.” These days I contemplate how writing is both resistance and reclamation. There are so many stories America has tried to hide from us, our own included, but we cannot be stopped from finding them, or from telling our own. How else do we survive, except through stories? 

Nobile: Marci, I think you make such an important point about the difference between surviving and thriving. Sure, many of us are technically still here, but how do we account for what was lost along the way? I carry so much rage because of the circumstances that brought me here, more precisely the long history of American occupation and military intervention that resulted in the destabilization of innumerable countries, many of which continue to suffer to this day. People like to consider South Korea a success story, but this telling entirely erases the separation of countless families when the DMZ line was drawn; it erases the lives that were lost as a result of the American war machine; it erases the hundreds of thousands of children who have since been taken away and adopted and their biological families who also suffered the consequences.

I write because I must. Because it’s the only way I know how to make sense of my rage and grief. Because I spent the first half of my life in silence, afraid of the sound of my own voice. Because I won’t be silent anymore. Because writing is a road toward healing. Because we deserve to heal and thrive.

Moon: I love both of your answers here. 

Each day I am still learning what it means to survive, what it means to live in a body ravaged by illness. When I first came to the United States, I was so sick the doctors thought I would not live to see my second birthday. I am hurtling toward death, but for now I am still alive. I write because I was never meant to survive. I write because my adoption was a form of disappearance—and yet here I am. I write because, as Audre Lorde wrote, “…there are so many silences to be broken.” 

What might you want to say about adoptee representation in media? 
Nobile: Time and time again we see adoptees inserted into narratives in ways that deny us a full and complex expression of self. So often characters are made into adoptees because it’s seen as an easy way to increase diversity and seem inclusive, and yet they ignore the ramifications of such a specific choice. I’m thinking of the A Wrinkle in Time movie that came out a few years ago. In the movie’s climax, the dad prioritizes saving his biological daughter and abandons his adopted son. Though the daughter ultimately returns to rescue her brother, the family never reckons with this choice and its consequences. Adopted kids have so few positive visible representations of themselves in film, TV, media, and literature, and this scene reinforces many adoptees’ deep fear of expendability. I’m also thinking of the new Netflix show The Chair. Of course, [the adopted character] Ju Ju is very cute, but her behavior is disregarded, and her antics are seen as comic relief. Matthew Salesses recently tweeted, “Characters are always going to be taking into account and [sic] race and gender because they’re a part of every interaction, but adoption isn’t. You can’t just add an adopted character without actually engaging with the ethics of adoption.” Making a character an adoptee completely shifts their position, and this needs to be considered when including adopted characters. We are not your token BIPOC.

Cancio-Bello: Absolutely! Tiana, you said it so beautifully, that we are denied “a full and complex expression of self.” Adoption often seems like an “easy” way to give a character a traumatic backstory or explain negative behavior. Consider the differences between Superman’s  and Loki’s backstories. The Chair resonated with a lot of people familiar with academia, and I love Sandra Oh, but I wonder what are the implications of Ju Ju’s first mother being Mexican, or that Bill, the white cis male love interest, is the only one who connects with Ju Ju, over a Mexican tradition, no less. While stories about blended families often include a character saying, “I would never want to replace your [parent],” the expectation is that adoptees’ first parents are utterly expendable (and unqualified) and that adoptees should be blank slates who accept parental swap-outs without a fuss. I do not mean that all adoptees are unhappy with their adoptive families, or that finding one’s first parents is unimportant, but these cannot be the only narratives we see. It was considered a huge breakthrough when Modern Family introduced Lily, a Vietnamese baby adopted by Mitchell and Cameron, and it remains one of the few inclusive LGBTQIA+ story lines I’ve seen, but even then the nuances aren’t always addressed. Adoption is complicated for all parties involved, and very few representations understand all the ethical complexities of including such narratives. Add transnational, transracial adoption into the mix and it gets even harder. This is why there cannot and should not be one representative narrative. Adoptees are not a monolith. We do not all come from the same places, we do not have the same histories and personalities, we do not want the same things in life—except perhaps to see ourselves. 

Moon: Yes, Tiana and Marci! 

What Asian American poets and/or adoptee poets have affected your writing?
Cancio-Bello: I do not have the privilege of going home to people who look like me. I have had to conscientiously educate myself on what it means to move through the world as an Asian American woman, to reclaim access to lullabies and histories of people who look like me. I have spent my whole life seeing terrible representations of adoptees and orphans in mainstream media and being told we are undesirable. I think of the first Asian American poets I read—Li-Young Lee and Aimee Nezhukumatathil—and how they astonished me and opened doors of possibility. This is how I began to love my Asian-ness. 

I remember Marilyn Chin, at my first Kundiman retreat, encouraging me to write about adoption (or else she would haunt me forever, she said); Lee Herrick, one of the first to recognize me as a fellow adoptee; Sun Yung Shin telling me she could count on one hand the number of AAPI adoptee poets in her generation; Jennifer Kwon Dobbs hugging me after a reading and calling me sister; Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know, gaining attention worldwide. Reading Don Mee Choi’s poems and translations felt like I’d found home for the first time, and I treasure her friendship fiercely. Leah Silvieus’s Arabilis; Ansley, your book, How to Bury the Dead; and Tiana, your book, Cleave, each speak to the adoptee experience in different ways I’d never seen represented before and that resonate deep within me. I am also seeing a new wave of high school and college adoptee writers beginning to rise. It seems that wherever I go, we find each other. This is a beautiful community that I never knew existed, and yet see how we rise together.

Nobile: In the 1980s and 1990s, white parents adopting children of color were told that color-blind assimilation was the best way to integrate us into the family. While I like to think that this decision was not made maliciously, it ultimately denied us the exploration and expression of a huge part of our identities. My family had no idea what it meant to be a Korean kid growing up in a predominantly white Long Island suburb, and I had no support system in place to help me figure it out. Like you, Marci, I’ve had to learn how to navigate the world as an Asian American woman without guidance or a road map. 

I remember discovering Sun Yung Shin’s Skirt Full of Black when I was in my early twenties. I had never met a Korean American adult adoptee and couldn’t even fathom one who also wrote poetry. I never could have imagined that years later, I would call Sun Yung a dear friend. Later I found Lee Herrick, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Nicole Chung, Matthew Salesses—all brilliant writers who are doing such important work to center adoptees’ voices and perspectives and shift prevailing notions around adoption. For too long, adoptive families and agencies have engineered and controlled the narrative, which is often grounded in religious savior complexes. By not being the tellers of our own stories, our existences become flattened and our bodies objectified. Adoptee writers are deepening and expanding understandings of the adoptee experience, which is complex and specific and far from a monolith. For me it’s profoundly special to see glimmers of my own experience in other people’s work. It’s a tacit understanding and closeness that isn’t replicable. I feel this most deeply when I read work by other transracial adoptees and by being in conversation and community with our collective.

Moon: As both of you experienced, representation was limited for me growing up. I longed for a mirror. I longed to see someone who resembled me in some way. I wish that I could have had your books, Tiana and Marci, growing up. Two adoptee writers who I first encountered were Sun Yung Shin and Jane Jeong Trenka. Saroo Brierley’s book A Long Way Home was one of the few South Asian adoptee narratives I read, and the intense longing and sadness gutted me. I began making a list of Asian American writers I deeply admire, but the list got too long! 

What has been inspiring you lately? Or what’s a poem or piece of writing you keep returning to, and why?

Moon: I have been especially into reading memoirs lately. I love nonfiction and the way that my favorite nonfiction writing echoes poetry and haunts. Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran took my breath away. I also loved Antiman by Rajiv Mohabir and Fairest by Meredith Talusan. I was excited to participate in the Sealey Challenge, poet Nicole Sealey’s invitation to read a book of poetry a day for the month of August. On deck this month are Sahar Muradi’s Ask Hafiz; Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral; Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, the Swarm; Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody; and Upend by Claire Meuschke.

Nobile: At a time when the pandemic is far from over, and I feel my world beginning to close back in again, I’ve been reconvening with old friends in other ways. Matthew Olzmann’s poem in the New York Times, “Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope,” was a welcome salve amid rising COVID numbers and subsequent anxiety. I’m rereading Macnolia by A. Van Jordan and remembering the deep breadth of it and continue to be impressed by how much a poet can accomplish in a single book. I also just reread Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities as a reminder and lesson to myself on how to imbue humor and tender vulnerability in my work. I’m honored to have my shelves (and browser!) filled with my friends’ words—poems I can turn to for inspiration and solace and to feel a little less lonely.

Cancio-Bello: I have been spending a lot of time with Joy Harjo’s poem “For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet,” which starts with “Put down that bag of potato chips” and ends with “Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.” Rather than expecting others to make conditions right and hold open doors for us, we can open them ourselves, call our spirits home, and invite others to step through with us. 

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which won the Donald Hall Prize, and co-translator of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021) by Korean poet Yi Won. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Orion, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She serves as a program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair. Her website is marcicalabretta.com.

Ansley Moon is the author of the poetry collection How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press, 2011). Moon is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kundiman, and the Mae Fellowship and is currently working on a second poetry collection, Register the Missing, which has been a finalist for the Pleiades Press Editors Prize and the Slope Editions Book Prize. Moon’s website is ansleymoon.com.

Tiana Nobile is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Nobile was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, and her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. She lives in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans. Her website is tiananobile.com.