WEBVTT NOTE Episode 120: Ocean Vuong: A Letter to Someone Who Can't Read It 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis, and my guest today is Ocean Vuong: poet, MacArthur fellow, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Time Is a Mother, and the novel we are here to discuss, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean, thank you for being here. 2 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 Thank you for having me. It is good to be in a room where slowness is allowed. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Describe the book for someone meeting it for the first time. 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:48.000 It is a letter from a young Vietnamese American man to his mother, who cannot read. It moves between a nail salon in Hartford, a tobacco farm, a first love, and a war that ended before he was born but never left the house. The form is a letter because the gap is the truth of it. 5 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:52.000 You came to fiction from poetry. What did the novel demand? 6 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:09.000 Time. A poem can stand in one moment and hold it to the light. A novel has to survive Tuesday. It has to carry people through years and boredom and a mother going to work. I had to learn to write a scene where nothing beautiful happens and it still matters. 7 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:13.000 You compose very slowly. 8 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:29.000 Some mornings, six sentences. I lay prose out like a line of poetry and I will not leave it until the sound is right. It is inefficient and I have stopped apologising for it. The pace is the price of the music. 9 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.000 What do you want the book to achieve? 10 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:49.000 To make a place where the people I come from are permanent. I grew up around bodies this country treated as temporary: refugees, factory workers, my grandmother. A book is one of the few structures we are allowed to build out of nothing but language, and it outlasts a lease. 11 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:52.000 Do you think about how far it travels? 12 00:01:52.000 --> 00:02:13.000 I do, and I have made peace with it. I want it in libraries and prisons and high schools, not only in the places that already read poetry. If a video of somebody reading one paragraph aloud brings a hundred thousand people to the book, I am grateful. Reach is not the opposite of care. 13 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:16.000 One thing for a young writer. 14 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:24.000 Read your work aloud to somebody who loves you. You will hear every false note in about ninety seconds. 15 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:47.000 Ocean Vuong, thank you. As with every guest, the work continues after this: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is featured on our promoted books page this month, in the newsletter, and across our channels. Follow the show, leave a review, and share this with one person who needs it. I'm Nora Ellis, and this has been Behind the Book.