12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her novels include The Box, a Bustle Best Books selection, and Drafts of a Suicide Note, a Foreword INDIES finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee. Awabi, her duet of short stories, won the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award; and her essay collection Listen, we all bleed was a PEN/Galbraith nominee and ASLE Book Award finalist. Her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Litro, Menagerie, Superstition Review, and Necessary Fiction and has won recognition in the Best of the Net and Aeon Award competitions.

She is represented by Akin Akinwumi (aakinwumi at willenfield dot com) at Willenfield Literary Agency.

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, Awabi, a duet of short stories, won the inaugural Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. It was my first opportunity to work with an editor, the great Gessy Alvarez, from whom I learned so much. She gave me the confidence to develop some of Awabi’s characters into protagonists of my current novel-in-progress, of which the lead character, Ayuka, daily brings me joy.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

Since my earliest days, all my favorite books have been novels; and it’s reading other books that makes me want to write them. Fiction has always been a refuge for me, a way of getting out of myself.

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?

It depends on the project. All my books begin as reams of handwritten notes; but whereas my novel The Box came together in less than a year, with the final manuscript bearing a surprising degree of resemblance to the first drafts, Ayuka’s novel is already in its third major overhaul.

4 - Where does a prose work 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?

Again, it depends. The Box and my first novel Drafts of a Suicide Note were conceived as novels, the novel form being my first love as a writer and my favorite kind of book to read. My short story “The Indoor Gardener,” though its acceptance for publication preceded that of The Box, began as an excerpt from that novel. Ayuka’s novel, though, is arising from short stories.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy giving readings, but I also find it terrifying. I’ve been fortunate in my audiences, which for the most part have been encouraging rather than discouraging. But I prefer only to give readings of work that’s already settled into itself.

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 seem to be obsessed with anti-anthropocentrism. Even when the first spark of a project is a human character, some nonhuman thing or phenomenon, like the handful of paper in Drafts of a Suicide Note, shows up to undermine the human characters’ agency and self-control. Dispelling the human from the center of our imaginative universes is vital: it has long been time to put other Earthlings first and to admit that without, for example, a healthy Ocean, our species will not survive. It’s our species’ hubris, believing humans to be the most important beings on Earth, believing ourselves to be entitled (by virtue of nothing whatsoever!) to exploit and consume everything else, that’s directly causing global ecological collapse.

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?

Literature has the ability to pinpoint and question the ambiguities inherent to each and every moment; great writing discovers beauty in ambivalence, complexity, even contradiction. In today’s egocentric, exclusionist, and exploitative cultures where simplistic demagoguery and unquestioning cancelations decide what counts as “free expression,” ambiguity is suffocated at every turn—and yet, it may be the only truth.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve been really fortunate so far in that the best, most talented, professional, and companiable editors have wanted to work with me; and they have shared my determination to make the book or story of the moment its best self. Even when that self is weird and doesn’t “fit in.” They’ve also relished joy and laughter as integral parts of the process, and that is so important.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

From Grace Paley in The Paris Review, an interview to which my awesome editor Yuka Igarashi drew my attention: “One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead. […] Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. […] Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I wouldn’t say that moving between forms has ever been easy for me. Novels and short stories require very different strategies for timing and pacing; essays are beholden to things beyond themselves to a greater extent than fiction. These constraints present specific challenges and opportunities that preclude effortless flowing between forms. But I do aspire to such flexibility in my writing; I don’t want my work to fall into unbreakable patterns. That means continuing to experiment with form, genre, language, subject matter beyond my comfort zones. Each project has something new to teach me.

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 try to keep to an eight-hour workday just as I would in any profession, but that doesn’t always pan out. Each morning begins with some sort of caffeinated beverage and a phone conversation with my mom, almost always about books!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

From the edge of writerly despair, I turn to other writers’ books. Anything with beautiful prose might help me to stave off panic and regroup—to find, if not exactly inspiration, the courage and desire to carry on searching for ideas.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Seaweed in salt water.

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?

Other-than-human Earthlings, including boxes, snails, sounds, artworks, buildings, shapes, and theoretical or scientific papers, are vital influences on my writing. I tend to think about language in musical terms; my sentences prioritize rhythm, timbre, tone, breath, phrasing . . . Even though I’m not a poet, the way a piece looks on a page, even in manuscript, is also an important consideration for me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Ah! You got me started. This list could go on for reams. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Clarice Lispector, Sofia Samatar, Andrei Platonov, Antoine Volodine, Lev Tolstoy, Mark Haber, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Fernando Pessoa, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Salman Rushdie, Amina Cain, Terry Pratchett, Mieko Kanai, Marie N’Diaye, Maxim Osipov, Chinua Achebe, Maria Stepanova, Yoko Tawada, W.G. Sebald, Maaza Mengiste, Yoko Ogawa . . .

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I wish I understood Greek, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and German, and I wish I could improve my totally inadequate French and Italian. If only such things came easily.

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?

Had I not decided to throw caution to the winds, throw over my education and common sense, and become a writer, I would’ve ended up a miserable musicologist or piano teacher wishing daily for the world to end me.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Can’t help it. Can’t stop. Tried to stop and (see question 17) shan’t try again.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Right now I’m reading two phenomenal novels for blurbs. Watch for both of them in 2024! Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber (forthcoming from Coffee House) is an inimitable digression on digression, grief, and techno that curls and stretches language in ways that English doesn’t often dare. The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan (forthcoming from Counterpoint) looks obliquely at McCarthy-era artworlds while experimenting elegantly with the very idea of “plot,” with what makes a story a love story, and of course with color. Films haven’t been doing it for me lately, but Nathan’s novel may just make me want to take another look at Old Hollywood.

20 - What are you currently working on?

In addition to Ayuka’s novel, I’m working with several writers and artists on The Tubercled Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope, which I was invited to create for Delisted 2023; an international artistic collaboration curated by Jennifer Calkins in honor of twenty-one nonhuman species that were recently stricken off the US Endangered Species List and declared extinct, relieving the US Government of the obligation to either seek them out or preserve their habitats.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Krieg

Brandon Krieg is the author of Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali, In the Gorge (Codhill Press, 2017), Invasives (New Rivers Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, BOMB, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Iowa Review, West Branch, and many other journals. He is an assistant professor at Kutztown University and lives in Kutztown, PA with his spouse, Colleen O’Brien, and their son.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I write poems, not books. That said, I love the poetry book as a form. So, there is always a little anxiety for me as to whether the poems I’ve been writing can hang together as a book. When the strange attractor of a book is vibrating the air, I print out all the poems I feel are done and I spread them out on the floor of a room and I stare at them a while until they start calling out to each other and then I arrange and rearrange them on the floor until it all makes sense to me. But I never know if it will make sense to someone else. I was thrilled, then, when Ander Monson chose to publish my chapbook, Source to Mouth, as a finalist for the New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest in 2012. It meant that an editor whose taste I respect thought that I had indeed put together a book that made sense. My most recent book, Magnifier, was put together in the same way. It feels different because I think the poems themselves are more playful and various than in my other collections. It was such an honor to have the book chosen by Kazim Ali, and, I must say, such a relief. Now those poems have a home, the book is done, they no longer require my attention, a big space is opened for whatever is next.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’ve loved the sounds of poetry for as long as I can remember. Early on it was Dr. Seuss, later Shel Silverstein. In second grade we read Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the repeated last line was so moving to me. I remember feeling like something had just happened to me and still thinking about the poem in a sort of daze on my walk home. I wanted to be able to do that with sound, too.

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?

I write constantly by hand in journals. A lot of observations, a lot of free association. I am in love with the process of discovery. Surprise is why I keep going back to the page. A.R. Ammons has an essay “A Poem is a Walk,” which makes so much sense to me. I love walking, too. I go for a walk not to see a particular thing, but to see whatever there is to see. I’d walk outside every day if I could. I am constantly surprised by what’s there. I write poems the same way. I flip through my journal, find some lines I like, type them on my typewriter next to other lines I like. Suddenly lines are calling out to lines and to new lines not yet written.  If I’m lucky there’s an urgency at the core of the lines discovered as they came together that holds them together. If not, I try again the next day. I used to worry a lot about whether or not I was writing a poem and whether or not it was good. Now I just trust that something good will come of what I’m doing eventually and try to have fun with it.

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?

Poems begin very small for me—usually with a line or two. That line calls out to other lines. Pretty soon a group of lines is there. Sometimes it feels like they’ve reached closure. Sometimes it feels like I have more lines to work with from the journal and a new section might start. I’ve written quite a few long poems in very different ways. I wrote the first poem in Source to Mouth, “I,Inc.” in one sitting, without lines, all in my notebook, almost verbatim, and worked out the lines later on the computer. That’s very unusual for me. I wrote a poem from Magnifier, “Comedy of Mirrors” which has 6 or 8 sections, by actually trying to write a much much longer poem that had over 50 sections before I abandoned it and culled the best of it for “Comedy.” I did something similar in a poem from my second book, In the Gorge, called “Verges,” and with the poems in the second section of Magnifier (which are all closely related), except in those cases I went to a particular place over and over again, took a bunch of notes after each visit, wrote way too many sections of the poem (or way too many poems) and then culled down to the best. I think of something I came across I think in Thoreau’s journals where he is astonished by how many acorns an oak has to drop to make another oak. That’s how I think about my poems—I write maybe ten pages of notes and drafts for every 10 lines I keep.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings are not part of my process because I don’t think about them at all as I write. I find I’m often not as inspired by poetry readings as I want to be. Even poets whose work I love often fall flat as readers. There’s a certain affect, a certain odd intonation many poets take on in performance that I find disingenuous and distracting, though I get where it comes from as I feel the pull of it too when I read out loud. The best readings I’ve been to recently have been open mics at our local bookstore in Kutztown, Firefly, and on campus, where students and community members come together and take turns reading their work in a pretty informal setting. I’ve seen students, positively shaking with emotion, for whom reading their work and being heard appeared to be a matter of life or death. Even when the work itself wouldn’t maybe be that moving on the page, you can’t help but get inspired by their belief in the power of language to express something meaningful to them. That gets me excited, and humbles me. Suddenly my poems feel stuffy or boring or stuck on the page. When I get up there, I try harder to bring the feeling in the poem out with my voice than I might if I were giving a solo reading somewhere and could get away with standard poetese.

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?

Cultivating compassion for myself and others. Paying attention. Being in my senses. Cultivating an awareness of my emotions. I intend to fully inhabit my life and poems are one acting out of that intention. In a culture driven by status, possession, power, my work keeps asking the questions I keep asking myself: How can we make meaning and do less harm? How can we make meaning now, in the imperfect world, even as we long for a better world?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I go in fear of self-righteousness and grandiosity because I know these things are in me and I see them in a lot of writers and artists. These impulses, though they might be indulged in for the most unassailable reasons, can quickly blind us to our actual impacts on the culture. If the politics and aesthetics of our work are righteous and yet we treat our loved ones with indifference, our colleagues with contempt, our students with condescension, our legacy on the culture will probably be to strengthen its worst tendencies. It is my intention, difficult as it is to practice, to cultivate compassion for the suffering of myself and others right where I am, to work to alleviate suffering, and to trust that the good of that practice will find its way into my work. In that way the work might have a positive impact, but probably secondary to the impact of my lived life. Many if not most writers I know have the privilege of being teachers or mentors at some time in their lives. I think by treating our students like their experiences and ideas are valid, like their lives matter, like they have tremendous capabilities, and by encouraging them and supporting them in their search for meaning, we have a wonderful opportunity to positively impact the culture.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

My experiences working with editors has always been positive, though it has also always been in the fine tuning stages of a book or poem that has already been accepted for publication. Editors, particularly Pauline Uchmanowicz at Codhill Press and Stephanie G’Schwind at The Center for Literary Publishing and their teams have given me invaluable suggestions on what to cut, what to footnote, and what to line-edit and made me feel like my manuscripts were in the best shape they could be in before being printed.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, “A Way of Writing.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Difficult. I love to read critical prose, but I don’t like to write it. When I’m writing, I prefer to trust the connections between things as they arise rather than worry them out.

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 try to write in my journal every day and usually do. When I have more time I go through my journal, find lines that feel like the start of a poem, and type them out on construction paper with my typewriter, or jot them out in a larger notebook. Then I move things around, add new lines, follow the sounds, meander, wander, until I run out of time, feel I’ve finished, or abandon the poem. If what I’ve written feels finished, I like to type it up on a piece of cardstock and mail it to a friend. It’s like publishing a single-page literary journal in an edition of 1 whenever you want. Eventually, if I have a ton of time, I’ll type up the poem on the word processor and finalize it, then go back to it a month or two later and see if I still like it.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My writing doesn’t get stalled because I write all the time with really low standards, but it does get very indoorsy if I don’t get outside and walk around. When that happens I go for a hike or visit the city. I am incredibly fortunate at the moment to live 15 miles from the Appalachian Trail and a 2-hour drive from Manhattan.   

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Wet bark dust, wet firs, wet moss, wet grass, wet earth. The scent of wet vegetation reminds me of Oregon, which is where I grew up and where my extended family still lives.

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?

Nature. I hike as often as possible, usually at least once a week. What I notice or think about while walking is a huge influence on my work. Music and visual art make me happy and attune me to the cosmic vibrations of the creative plane (vibes, etc.), but I find I write about them directly less than I once did.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

For my work: Lorine Niedecker, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Gary Snyder, Jean Valentine, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Ed Roberson, Arthur Sze, Lisa Robertson come immediately to mind.

For my life: Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Rebecca Solnit, Thich Nhat Hanh

And so many more.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Hike the Pacific Crest Trail—Maybe the section in Oregon first, but if I was really ambitious, the whole thing.

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 think I’d like to work in the Forest Service or be a therapist or be a mail carrier on a walkable route.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve wanted to do write as long as I can remember. As soon as I could write, in first grade or so, it was my favorite thing to do in school along with reading.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

In Defense of the Earth by Kenneth Rexroth; Parasite by Bong Joon-Ho

20 - What are you currently working on?

Poems.

12 or 20 (second series)questions;