Season 4 · Episode 120 · Purpose
with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
A two-voice studio conversation: Nora Ellis and Ocean, with clickable questions below. Our interviews are written and voiced dramatisations, drawn from each author's publicly documented remarks on craft.
From poetry to the novel, writing scenes where nothing beautiful happens, and building something permanent for people a country treated as temporary.
Nora Ellis in conversation with Ocean Vuong · click a timestamp to jump
Nora Ellis
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.
Ocean Vuong
Thank you for having me. It is good to be in a room where slowness is allowed.
Nora Ellis
Describe the book for someone meeting it for the first time.
Ocean Vuong
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.
Nora Ellis
You came to fiction from poetry. What did the novel demand?
Ocean Vuong
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.
Nora Ellis
You compose very slowly.
Ocean Vuong
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.
Nora Ellis
What do you want the book to achieve?
Ocean Vuong
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.
Nora Ellis
Do you think about how far it travels?
Ocean Vuong
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.
Nora Ellis
One thing for a young writer.
Ocean Vuong
Read your work aloud to somebody who loves you. You will hear every false note in about ninety seconds.
Nora Ellis
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.
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