Victoria Chang earned a BA in Asian studies from the University of Michigan, an MA in Asian studies from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford University, and an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Because if you cared too much about other people, you wouldve done other things, and you would never be able to chain yourself to a desk. Im a very superstitious person. Dear Memory begins with a photograph of a young Chang sitting with her mother and sister. And these tankas are perfect for dealing with grief and children. Its a really strange question. Children are distracting, and writing this form was distracting, and the tanka is small, and children are small. Now I ask questions, I bring glasses. No, thats not for you, thats for him. It was funny. The result is ambiguous: the floor plan sells prospective buyers on a generic, idealized formula for Anglo-American life (The Oxford), even as the interview betrays the contingency of Changs Asian American childhood. The front page of the May 24, 2020 print edition of the N ew York Times, which was covered with a heartbreaking wall of text showing 1,000 obituaries for Americans who died from the coronavirus (culled from nearly 100,000 death notices at the time), chillingly portrays the grim vastness of the tragedy we're . I dont know. I think a lot of poets have depressive tendencies, and I certainly do. Thats what I wanted to write this book for. All rights reserved. Except they were leading the oddest parallel lives. Then I just kept on working on that, and making them sharper, and making the language better. Thats where my comfort level was. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com. I kind of got used to having them around. Changs poems, too, attempt to contain loss. Occasionallybeautifullythose attempts falter. With this issue, we are publishing three of Changs Obit poems, My Mothers Favorite Potted Treedied in 2016, a slow death, Similesdied on August 3, 2015, and Tomas Transtrmerdied on March 26, 2015, at the age of 83. I know you will enjoy reading them alongside the following excerpt from my conversation with Chang, wherein we discuss poetry and how loss is life-changing, sometimes in a good way. 2.5 bath. VC: I do that with A. Whats left is just the shell. Specialties Ophthalmology Cornea & External Diseases Board Certifications Ophthalmology Learn why a board certification matters Languages English Chinese Awards Healthgrades Honor Roll Changs obits are their antitheses. HS: Which is amazing. I kind of miss that. The same with foods like apple sauce. HS: I think youve achieved that so well, because with Obit, the poems are so intensely personal, and yet theyre immensely universal. Many poets are much more involved. I thought that was really interesting, and I think youre talking about that, how loss. Chang resists conventional elegy, writing not only about the dead but to them. HS: Someone said to me a few years ago to write hard stuff in form. Click a location below to find Victoria more easily. Then I ended up spending the next two weeks in a fury, not doing much else but writing them. So Changs string of metaphors grandiose aphoristic nuggets like Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present. Includes Address (11) Phone (11) Email (5) See Results. In her new book Dear Memory, Victoria Chang shares family photos, marriage certificates, translated letters from cousins, even floor plans, to explore grief. I dont know. To send a letter is to believe in a time and place in which it will be read. Humanities Speaker Series: Victoria Chang Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief THU SEP 15, 2022, 7:30 PM The Commons (and online via Hall Center Crowdcast) For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. Here her trowel is those sentences and phrases that, through a heavy anaphoric refrain in this case I wonder and I imagine, among others push her contemplations forward while also constantly circling back. I think thats part of what allows the readers to really embrace this book and find our own stories in it. Though organizing themes or contours have always been central to written poetry, recent books design and enact forms that specifically deny the traditional supremacy and intensive mythology of Western logic Victoria Chang on bonsai trees, witticisms, and the wisdom of not giving a crap. HS: Yeah, but you do too; thats another form of losshaving your father be unable to speak, and you being a writer. Can you tell me how you came up with the cover, with a repeating image of your face and obit poem? I find myself always calling to my mom when something bad happens, or when I need her. Victoria Chang Winzone Realty Inc. A few called and cried or asked questions. She graduated from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School. Its awful. Just that really long O. And when you say the O, your mouth stays open and then the T is really hard, and theres that finality of the T, which almost feels like a door shutting, like death. Victoria Chang is a teacher's assistant at Punahou Dance School, teaches dance at the Performing Arts Center of Kapolei and is a member of the National Honor Society. So how could I use language, and explain something so visceral and so violent, which is grief and death. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I had no idea that anything in my poems was remotely funny. Im still never going to tell people stuff, because Im not that open of a person, and so I think that Obit was more revealing, for me, than my other books. Work harder than everyone else, do the best you can, and just go-go-go, mostly because its a good thing to be ambitious, apparently, but also because we are marginalized in all sorts of obvious ways. Victoria Chang: Yeah, . applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss. Their daughter inherited a quantitative aptitude and earned an MBA from Stanford University, eventually working in various business jobs such as management consulting and marketing. For me, my grief is much more pointed, and for you its probably even more so. All rights reserved. Because for me its always about vulnerability. In addition to editing, she writes children's books and teaches in Antioch Universitys MFA program. The autobiographical becomes the universal. Searching. But her engagement is always brief and her destination always feels predetermined, something she herself admits in a letter to her teacher: Once you told me that sometimes I was in danger of outsmarting my poems, that sometimes my poems were written to illustrate an understanding I already had.. She felt so isolated by caregiving that she started writing down her anger, her fear, her frustration in notebooks that eventually became the poems in Obit, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Her other books are Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press) and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press). Shes also the author of a chapbook and a political poetry pamphlet. 249 In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. There are the times she recounts being told to go back to China and being mistaken for another Asian writer, and she reflects on the ways her familys restaurant, Dragon Inn, catered to American expectations of what Chinese food should be. Who doesnt have questions when were talking about death, or existential things, and grief? In one of their conversations most wrenching moments, Changs mother recalls a memory from her journey to Taiwan: I still remember a woman holding a small childs hand to get on the boat and then she realized it wasnt her child. What did she do?, Chang asks. These poems are so poignant about that. Victor was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and obtained a degree in architecture from the University of Cape Town. Request a transcript here. Because I find writers to be, I dont know how you do, but I just find writers to be, literally, the most narcissistic bunch of people Ive ever known. The subject matters broadthey cover everything from your fathers frontal lobe, to your mothers blue dress, to time and reason and memorybig topics. The editors discuss Victoria Changs poem Obit in the July/August 2018 issue of Poetry. The type of writers that I admire, theyre always people who are pushing the boundaries and trying new things. Its mimicking the obituary form in that way, because I think its really hard to pull off really sad poems by being sad. I mean its dark humor, but its there, and that gift of comic relief is really a rare talent, and it is a gift. HS:I think youve probably seen this already, but once this full collection is out, people are going to be teaching obits. How did you come up with this obit format? When language is just one big failure, a jumble of words, how do I do that? Send any friend a storyAs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. There have been a ton of amazing elegies, dont get me wrong, but I couldnt find a grief book in poetry that really spoke to me. Try for free at rocketreach.co My parents absolutely did not believe in any sort of God that would be recognizable in this country. Im still very much that way. Kellogg is a former books editor of the Times and can be found on Twitter @paperhaus. "Victoria Changdied unknowingly on June 24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway," says another. Her parents were immigrants from Taiwan. VC: Yeah, it deepens you. There may be one clear point of connection between the image and the words in that first collage, the phone that Chang notes is ringing is the phone hanging on the wall in the photograph but these connections are either too literal or virtually nonexistent. I think its because of my agemy parents became ill maybe a little earlier than average, and then I had children a little bit later, and so it kind of mixed together so that my children were exactly the same age as my parents, in terms of dying. At 49, Chang is a smiley and chatty author who got into writing . I can be very sarcastic as a person I think that comes through in my writing without me realizing it. And I was like, good luck with that because we lose; its automatic. I dont at all need mine to do that, but I do hope they resonate with people, and that they can help people. I knew people who cut grapes into fours. HS: No, it makes total sense. Time breaks for the living eventually and they can walk out of doors. 6 min read Victoria Chang, author of the poetry collection "Obit." (Isaac Fitzgerald) It happened before she expected it: Victoria Chang's parents were struck by. Such a clich. She also shares new, uncollected poems. So, youre helping four people do opposite things. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. I told him my manuscript was in my purse, like it always is, and he asked to see it; so we were sitting in this corporate L.A. building reading poems together. If you had some preserved salty plums, which we both love, in your pocket. Here is a set of wishes that cant be granted. All content by Victoria Chang. Lands you never knew? People have said this tooyoure born, and you get diapers, and then you die and you have to wear diapers. Chang is the author of The Trees Witness Everything, (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021); OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2018 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and nominated for a National Book Award; Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); and The Boss (McSweeney's, 2013), 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ETAt first, Sharon Olds's poem seems to be about a simple condiment. The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. That became the challenge, and that was really, really hard. I always say you can build it and break it you can always build something else. Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal andthe author the award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}(C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019). Oddly, the box form, the rectangular constraint, was really freeing. The other thing that is present throughout, and its throughout all of your books, but I think it stands out here in Obit, is your sense of humor and the ability to inject humor into some kind of bleak situations. They also speak more toward the general loss of language, and of life. Chang has said that she chose the obit form because she didnt want to write elegies. The elegy, poetrys traditional response to death, is a genre for mourning, usually in the first-person singular. Residential For Sale . In no way did I ever want anyone to feel sorry for me, because that would be absolutely the antithesis of being that strong woman that my mom so badly wanted me to be and was herself. But my mission in life, my mother gave to me, was always to be really successful at whatever I did. Victoria Changdied unknowingly on June 24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway. The form was really cool. This is a childs fantasy of connection. A phone hangs behind them. She spoke to the Times about writing, grief, dark humor and what its been like talking about a book about mourning during the pandemic. If you had pockets in your dress. I noticed its been published in pieces, so I was just curious about where that came from? I was thinking Oh, it must leak out somehow. (2021). At intervals, the book includes tankas a traditional Japanese poetic form often written by women and a long sonnet-like series that stretches in fractured lines across the pages, a visual and textual counterpoint to the sharply confined obits. The game is never one that we win. The book was a TIME, Lithub, and NPR most anticipated book of 2021. While of course, the obituary as a poetic form is dark, these poems can also be funny. Interview with Colin Winnette, logger.believermag.com. Language died on March 4th, 2017. Oh, my gosh. I think I also had taken the other half of those poems and put them in Barbie Chang, and then I had done the same thing at the end of Barbie Chang, I had broken those up. Its not even about going on vacation together, its just the little things that I miss. If your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone. Outside of the office, Victoria enjoys being outdoors, spending time with friends, traveling with her husband, and volunteering. Then also, its so lonely. I also think that I hadnt experienced real hardship until my dad had a stroke, and that was in my late 30s. Whereas, I think in the past, my books and my work were more intellectually based. Chang's mother died on August 3, 2015, and her father suffered a stroke on June 24, 2009, that left him a shell of his former self. We went to a Presbyterian church, but it was mostly for them to socialize with other Chinese people. Victoria Chang died on August 3, 2015, the one who never used to weep when other people's parents died. Where did you go to graduate school? HS: Whatever you did, your drone-magic-stuff worked. Can I talk to you about the sequence Im a Miner. Her most recent poetry book, OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Chang's first book of poetry, Circle, won the Crab Orchard Review Award Series in Poetry and won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and was a Finalist for the 2005 PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as a Finalist for the Foreward Magazine Book of the Year Award.