From the Archives: Ocean Vuong (part 3)

"It feels like drag to me: to be extra. Maybe it is purple, and that's perfectly fine. There's too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen."

photo by Celeste Sloman via

Hello friends! I’m writing with the third and final installment of our 2020 interview with Ocean Vuong, who I believe is one of the great writers (and thinkers about writing) of our age. In the first part, we talked about the day when, as a teenager, he walked away from his job at Boston Market (of the iconic cake-masquerading-as-cornbread) and into the cornfield nearby. He recalled realizing in that moment that he needed to “hide from the life I was given and enter a different world, a different cornfield."

In the second part, we talked about —among other things— the way his writing pushes back against modernist ideas about masculinity and American triumphalism in literature: the notion that lyric, sentimental, or “purple” prose is effeminate and unserious, or the notion that writers should center their stories on where the “action” is, where the recognizable “heroes” are. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he wanted to write a lyric novel set entirely “in the aftermath”, centering on the people who are typically left to clean up the damage left in the wake of the “heroes.”

In this final part of the conversation, we dig into the notion of aftermath a little more, and into the way Vuong sees language (and specifically books) as architectures we create to house our souls. There’s also an incredible train of thought in here about Vuong’s reluctance to call himself a writer, and his attitude toward what some call writer’s block.

As always, you can listen to our whole catalog for free in our archive. The best way to make sure you never miss an interview is to subscribe to the show and to this letter.

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Thresholds x Ocean Vuong

Originally released August 12, 2020

photo by Gioncarlo Valentine via

Ocean Vuong’s poetry collections include Time is a Mother and Night Sky with Exit Wounds. His novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was a bestseller and won the American Book Award. Ocean himself was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2019. He is a professor of Modern Poetry and Poetics at NYU.

Thresholds: At the very beginning of our conversation you described an event, even if it was just an internal event, of entering this space of a cornfield and then having an epiphany. Do you still feel like you're living the aftermath of that moment, or does it feel resolved for you? How linear and clean does that narrative feel?

Ocean Vuong: Oh god, it's hard to say. I'm suspicious of it being linear and clear. I wonder if the aftermath is inescapable. And I wonder if the role of the book is not so much to resolve an aftermath, but to build an architecture in which thinking and feeling can be housed within aftermaths. All art, particularly sentence-making, is order. Chaotic at times, but we are making order. One word comes after another. Subordinate clauses prop up independent clauses and so on and so forth. I think the great opportunity of writing is to give order within something that's supposed to be a wasteland. It's like you go into the wasteland and you start to erect this architecture and you say, This is how I think and feel, and this is what this architecture helps me do. That in itself seems miraculous to me, to be able to do that.

I think often of Toni Morrison's Beloved, which is a book entirely in aftermath. It's so incredible that her contribution to the genre of slave narratives was about freedom, was about slaves leaving their lives and creating the first notion of an individual life. And of course, it's about motherhood and much more. But I often look at that book as sort of this brave testimony to being someone who is writing about characters who are both victims but also rulers of their lives with an aftermath. I'm incredibly inspired by that book and a lot of her work.

Thresholds: I love the image of language or a book as architecture that you built to house thinking and feeling. It reminds me of something I read that you said in a different interview, that writing or language, like the body, is a place to store the soul. That it is an external architecture that you build, perhaps beside your body, in which to store your thinking and feeling soul.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, it's like a parallel universe. You know, I joke sometimes and I say, I write poetry and fiction-- I don't know if I would ever write a memoir. I say so because I think I wrote a novel because I'm a coward. If I were to ask questions of my family, if I were to ask questions of my life, I think I would be crying in 30 seconds. Nothing would get done, and it would be brutal. I don't think I have the heart to be a documentarian, for example, to sit a subject under some lights and ask some questions. I think I would fold so quickly. I think it's safer for me to ask questions of characters and then eject them into this parallel world and have them answer the questions for me. I think at the heart of it, it's cowardice.

Thresholds: I have often felt that the reverse that fiction, and creating characters to ask questions to, would be much more frightening than simply asking questions of of life or of people. But that's perhaps just a temperamental thing.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, it's scary all around. It's just whatever you're suited to, I guess. But none of it is lovely, per se. [laughter]

Thresholds: It's true. It's true, though the results can be very lovely.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The satisfaction of a building a container that honestly and faithfully holds your questions. Oh, there's nothing like it! There's really nothing like it, to say: "Wow, my DNA! The DNA of my mind!" You know, often we talk about a fingerprint and how no one else earth has it, but what what is the DNA of a personhood? We're lucky enough as a species to have this technology called language in which a book, a poem, a novel, or even a memoir, is that. It is the linguistic thumbprint of who we are written right there on the page. And no one else can really write and think in that way. That seems so special to me. I'm so grateful for us as a species to have that tool.

I write very seldom. Most of my writing happens in the body, I think, and I don't want to attach myself to even the identity of a writer, or the career of a writer. I don't it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I've been thinking about this. You know, that all of my 12 years doing this, and I still haven't been able to to be comfortable identifying myself as a writer.

Thresholds: Why, do you think?

Ocean Vuong: I think there's so little ground in it. I worry that as soon as I call myself a writer, I'm chaining myself to something. An expectation, a life, a career. You know, I grew up with folks who worked in factories and nail salons. They put their bodies in those rooms, in those factories every day from 9 to 5, sometimes 9 to 9. And that was very real to me. That was, you know, absolutely tangible. I think there's some sort of, maybe survivor's guilt, in my own thinking. You know, how dare I call myself a writer when I barely write? But on top of that, I don't think... A book seems so miraculous. When you finish it, it feels like you've done something against all odds with yourself. I think when you finish one, it's almost silly to think you can keep doing this or that you even should keep doing this. I think I'm more interested in seeing my work as the result of living, rather than a career or a purpose for living.

Thresholds: When you say you think most of your writing happens in the body, what do you mean?

Ocean Vuong: For example, when I was a younger writer, I was in New York and all my friends did all this... You know, they'd write every day. They had they were obsessed with word count and page counts, and I realized that this was a condition not of being writers, but being in capitalism. That so much of how we value our work was already predetermined by the culture of capitalism. Then, as I saw progress [being] weaponized against each other. It took a lot of love and excitement out of the writing process for me. And, you know, they would have contests where they write a novel a month or write 30 poems in 30 days. It was very ecstatic and very beautiful, but I couldn't do it. I just felt like I was interrupting my own thinking just to have a product. So I developed a different way that was much more comfortable to me, which was to take walks and to ask questions and to think. One of the threads in the novel was this thread about veal. The veal calf and how it's raised, in, in...

Thresholds: “In a box the size of its life,” is one of the phrases you use, which I love so much.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, yeah. When I came upon that research, I just kept having this image of this poor little child in the field at night, surrounded by lush, sweet nature, in a full, lit field full of stars and moons and then trapped in this box the size of its life. And I didn't know what to do with it. But then I kept thinking about it and said, why am I attracted to this?

That's the most important part of the writing process to me. I tell my students, if you have what you think is called writer's block, don't fight it. There's a reason. It means you're not ready. Imagine if I sat down and just started writing about veal in a field. I don't think anything would have come of it, but I stopped and through months I said, why am I obsessed with this? I started to think about American boyhood, American childhoods. I think that's why: the veal is the emblematic symbol to me of the American childhood that's surrounded by such immense promise, immense horizonless opportunity. We are, in fact, trapped by the conditions that made us, the rules that we're not supposed to break. And I saw that the Trevor character tied so closely [to this], so I made up the fact that he can't eat veal. That this tender part of him refuses to participate in veal eating, in children-eating. Thinking and infusing meaning into the thought before a single sentence was written-- that was so much more efficient. If I were to free-write that scene [immediately], it might have taken me about 50 pages to get to the connections with Trevor and then to build his character in a way that made sense for him to not eat veal, etc., etc., and to have that whole metaphor tied to the the great tragedy of American youth… that might have taken me 50 pages. Imagine wading into that 50 page mess to salvage any clarity.

“It feels like drag to me: to be extra. Maybe it is purple, and that's perfectly fine. It's extra. There's too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen. That visibility is part of the triumph of surviving.”

Thresholds: I'm so struck by the resonance between the image of the veal as the metaphor for American childhood, as [existing] in this field of immense possibility, but trapped in this very confined small space. The image that you gave us at the very beginning of our conversation was of yourself also in a field, looking up and feeling constrained and imagining something else. It sort of sounds like what you're saying is that part of what writing can do, or part of what writing is about for you, is the process of imagining beyond present material constraints?

Ocean Vuong: Yes. And using old tools on your own terms. That's so important. I think one of the greatest failures we could do is to really look at literary progression as truly linear, because when we do that we almost deem everything in the past as defunct and useless, and also that we have to surpass it and innovate over it and supplant it. You know, there's so much great wealth that's been discovered by people who came before us, and to say that we have to erase them through our presence --which is, again, this very patriarchal mythos of the son must take over his father to have a legitimate life and etc..-- it's absolute B.S., I think. That's why I was interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present. It feels like drag to me: to be extra. Maybe it is purple, and that's perfectly fine. It's extra. There's too much glitter because there's a reason why we want to be blindingly present and seen. That visibility is part of the triumph of surviving.

I'm so, so fascinated into that because when modernism came, it came as a result of great shame. The European sublime that was brought forth by romanticism and the enlightenment was no longer feasible in fields after World War One full of dead cattle, dead men, mustard gas and absolute atrocity. The odes to clouds and daffodils seemed silly and immature after World War One. I think it was rightfully so that a lot of the Western tradition sobered up, quote unquote. But it was done only on the terms and with the terms and obsessions of white men. And then it was propped up as a universal value. It's a localized progression that was then presented as a universal truth. That was my problem with it. I said, Well, maybe just because you're ashamed of what you've done doesn't mean we should abandon the long sentence and the metaphor.

“The odes to clouds and daffodils seemed silly and immature after World War One. I think it was rightfully so that a lot of the Western tradition “sobered up”. But it was done only on the terms and with the terms and obsessions of white men. Well, just because you're ashamed of what you've done doesn't mean we should abandon the long sentence and the metaphor.”

Mentioned in this interview:

• Toni Morrison’s Beloved

• Ocean’s interview with Krista Tippett for On Being

• The sublime in romanticism

• Veal :(

Not mentioned but useful advice: Ocean’s recommendations at the end of this Creative Independent interview, which is a fantastic read in itself.

And that’s it! Our gratitude to Ocean Vuong for his time and talents. We’ll be back soon with a new episode featuring the poet (and co-author of one of our favorite newsletters:

Astro Poets

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Dorothea Lasky

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Til next time—

Jordan

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