Verdad Magazine Volume 6
Spring 2009, Volume 6
An Interview with Poet Ching-In Chen
by Bonnie Bolling
What led you down the poetry path?
I've always loved words and stories, but I didn't discover my love of poetry until my early 20s when I was doing community work and listening to performance poets like I Was Born With Two Tongues and Ishle Yi Park. Those poets let me in to a place that I didn't understand before. I was drawn by their passion and their energy. At that time, I found it easier to capture snapshots of moments than working on a longer project. Poetry felt like the appropriate medium.
This has been an ongoing journey for me—I feel like I've been invited into this world that is strange, lovely and wondrous and I'm learning everyday about what it means to be a part of this world.
Who do you read—who informs your work?
Too many to name to do justice! But at this particular moment, the books that have become old friends that I like to have in close rotation/constellation to me are Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution; Terrance Hayes' Wind in a Box; Juan Felipe Herrera's Half of the World in Light; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee; A. Van Jordan's M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A; and Kimiko Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior. Books I have been continually reading and re-reading and cannot bear to finish quite yet this past year: Matthew Goulish's 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance; Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas; Julio Cortázar's Cronopios and Famas. The book I can't keep a copy of because I keep giving away: Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons. This list changes every day, and I have 300 books piled up in my room, waiting for me.
Advice for emerging writers? Things to know before choosing a writing program?
What really helped me was discovering the idea of writing as an act of practicing and committing to showing up at the page, no matter what mood I was in and what was going on in my life. Attempting to let go, in the moment of creation, that critic's sour voice. Another writer I recently met described it as meeting your duende on the page daily, which I also really like.
The best advice I've gotten about choosing a writing program: to think about what I really needed and wanted that I wasn't getting currently in my life and which program I thought could meet those needs. Initially, when I was thinking about MFA programs, I thought I was going to try to do a low-residency program and continue to work full-time, but I realized that my job was too overwhelming and I wasn't going to be able to make that kind of structure work for the kind of job I had at the time.
What is your writing "process?" What "happens" as you work your way through a poem?
I connect with Juan Felipe Herrera's idea of opening yourself up to the "riff." Also, I relate to the idea of the zuihitsu form, a Japanese prose/poetic form I've been working in, to "follow the brush." I typically write by hand, sometimes re-writing it by hand again as I revise. Usually, by the time I type it up, it's towards the final draft stages. I do much better in a collective environment so I've learned to reach for what I feel I need for my writing, such as setting up writing dates or joining a writing group.
What are you working on, thesis-wise?
I am working on a multi-genre project about the global history of coolies. For my thesis, I think I'm going to focus particularly on historic Riverside Chinatown as a doorway to the rest of the project.
What's the best thing about the UCR writing program?
The two main reasons I chose UCR over other programs are related -- the multi-genre aspect of the program and the diversity of the staff, faculty, and students. I think that I've always been attracted to creative work that pushes the edges of what's being done, whether in different languages or in the land between the genres. I've been able to take a workshop in each genre that the writing program offers (poetry of course, fiction, nonfiction screenwriting and playwriting). I've learned so much from my fellow writers in the program—and I feel grateful to be in a program where we support and care about each other, despite the many different places where people originate.
BIO: Ching-In Chen is a poet and multi-genre, border-crossing writer. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow. A community organizer, she has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston. Ching-In's work has recently appeared in Tea Party, Fifth Wednesday Journal, OCHO, Iron Horse Literary Review and Water~Stone Review. Ching-In currently lives in Riverside, California, where she is in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of California Riverside. She is the author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems.