He resides in Bolton, Massachusetts, where he lives and works on a family farm. His creative practice—both in poetry and visual art—centers on themes of memory, rural labor, and the meditative quiet of agrarian life.
1 — How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was actually After (Abingdon Square, 2009), written in the form of letters. For example, "Letter to My Mother," "Letter to My Father," etc., as a way of imagining what I would say to them individually had they lived to see me grow up. I worked on it for a very long time, but didn’t know where to send it until a friend who was starting a small press took an interest. This first book of letters was very affirmative and inspiring. I have never stopped writing since.
When On Earth Beneath Sky came out, I was even more proud of my accomplishment. I had sent to the editor a very big stack of prose and poems. Then, he asked me to reduce it to about a hundred pages. After farming daily, I would dive through hundreds and thousands of pages in tears, wondering how I could have written that much over the years as a non-native English speaker. I was spilling out my guts, my memory dumping onto the page as a way of talking to myself, trying to understand my place in the world, in nature, and so on.
After deals a lot with Cambodia, the aftermath, the migration, and what I wanted to tell my parents and siblings—like letters that could be sent to them from the United States. Back then, Cambodia was still closed to the world.
2 — How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to the US at the age of ten. One of the ways I could learn new English words was to write Haiku—five-seven-five syllables. It taught me how to count. I started writing rhymed poems in high school because I hadn’t read Walt Whitman then. When I won a poetry contest, I received a hundred dollars, which felt so heavy inside my pocket. I was in tears spending part of the one hundred dollars for a hamburger at McDonald's.
Poetry was short and easy. It was something I could finish, as opposed to starting with fiction or a memoir, like a few Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge Genocide did. I just wrote about my life in the US.
On On Earth Beneath Sky and Echoes Lost to Wind, people expected me to write a childhood narrative under the Khmer Rouge, but I didn’t. I wrote about Cambodia after the UNTAC-monitored democratic elections. The aftermath was full of struggle and hardship. I wrote about love and sex growing up in the US. I wrote about nature, and the farm in Bolton, MA.
I chose the healing narrative rather than, “I am a survivor” of a genocide.
3 — How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
First, I usually think of an overarching title or theme. Let's say I want to write about man against nature. I would usually come up with the title for my manuscript, and then I just go at it every day—one poem a day, just free writing. Once I feel I have all the poems, then I go through the process of culling tells and abstracts, or I combine short poems into one. I will organize the poems into thematic breaks until I feel satisfied, maybe after a third or fourth revision.
4 — Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I usually try to work on an entire book from the beginning. Within that book frame of mind, poems will come, maybe while I am thinning peaches or putting seeds into the soil.
5 — Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes, I love to read. I enjoy reading when there’s interaction with the audience—asking questions or offering an understanding or an interpretation of the poems I read.
6 — Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I usually start with a certain observation and see what tensions I can put forth, what questions I can answer, and what discomfort I can absolve through words as images and metaphors, stream of consciousness, and so on. One of the biggest questions I have is: why are humans such menaces on earth? Why this repetitive form of competition? Why war? Why race? What’s the point of life and death?
I ask a lot of "why?" Where I was born, I wasn’t told to ask why. Just accept the way it is. Therefore, I became a *why?" man..
7 — What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think we don’t have a culture of readers with an intellect like twenty or thirty years ago. The internet has co-opted our brains. Our intelligence is facing a global pandemic of obesity. Brain tumors and dementia are on the rise. The culture of forgetting has infested our bone marrow, clogging our bloodstream with literary porn. So much sensationalism. But I am all for the greater flow as part of the human condition, struggling with how to live, where and what to be or become.
8 — Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I really need an outsider to read my stuff. I am not so sure of my English. I still need an editor to point out tells and abstracts, and whether this poem goes well with that. Editing my own work is my weak point. I need someone else to read it with a fresh pair of eyes.
9 — What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A friend said I write best about what I know. For example, I know hunger. I know about war. I know how I became an orphan. I know my own body, the pulses of my own heart. "Write about that," she said.
10 — How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to painting)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think the two art forms complement each other well. When I write a poem, I have to closely see the image that I intend to paint. Only, in visual art, you can be abstract. In a poem, only a limited amount of the abstract can work in context. I use the visual to inform the poem; the poem to manifest the visual.
11 — What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write on my iPhone, using Google Docs. The moment I get up, I write something. Sometimes I get up at two or three in the morning to write. I keep a notebook, a pen, and the phone next to my pillow. Often I write in the dark into a notebook like doing a blind contour drawing. While farming, I carry my phone around so when I think of something—even a line that leads to a larger piece—I can connect all the dots.
12 — When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I paint, or I smear colors on canvases or a piece of wood. I’ll do a collage, or simply wait for the muse to flirt for a kiss.
13 — What fragrance reminds you of home?
The Asian pear blossom that smells like semen or a condom, or a rotting sewer—this scent of sex in the air. Because I used to live as a child close to the village brothel, where one of my brothers soldiered his way into manhood, buying sex with his well-polished rifle.
14 — David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I used to read a lot, but now, I can’t even finish a book. Sometimes when I am stuck, I will read a poet laureate like Louise Glück or the father of free verse, Walt Whitman, or Robert Frost’s nature poems. Or, if I fall in love, I go for Pablo Neruda (but instead of the body of a woman, I write about the body of another man).
15 — What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
When I was in high school, I read Hemingway because he was very handsome, and his sentence structure was short and to the point. Then I came upon Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, so when I think of a manuscript, I begin organizing poems like leaves, like a stream flowing out into the ocean.
Right now, I am reading Map by Wisława Szymborska. I think she’s also a poet laureate. Laureates write about simple, ordinary things with big questions and thematic vastness, full of heartthrobs, heart-strung
16 — What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to become a poet laureate. I want to write poems that wow. When a reader eyes my words, their tongue drops to the floor like a dog panting, dripping with awe.
17 — If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I wanted to be a ballet dancer like Baryshnikov. I wanted to fly my body out of gravity. Then, I wished I had gone to medical school to have a steady job and income, just chilling and helping other people. Furthermore, I want to become a novelist like Joyce Carol Oates.
18 — What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
To stay sane and focused. To discover new ways of saying the same thing. Everything in life as of now has been said and done. What more can you invent? Except the things that are done by you. I am my own voice, and knowing I have a voice feels pretty good.
19 — What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I also saw the movie.
20 — What are you currently working on?
I just finished a manuscript called Cracks Mended Gold. I completed a novella, finally, called The Story of a Deaf Mute. I haven’t sent it to any publisher yet. I just got another title for another manuscript called Improper Proportion, which looks at the intelligence of animals compared to that of man’s.
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