with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
Loading countdown…
Add to calendarVuong on writing prose at the pace of poetry, and refusing to apologise for it.
Everyone was given ninety minutes to write one sentence they'd defend. Eleven read theirs out. Two of them were extraordinary.
Born on a rice farm outside Saigon and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Vuong came to fiction from poetry and writes at a famously slow pace, sometimes a handful of words in a morning. His debut novel is addressed to a mother who could not read it, a gap he treats as the engine of the book rather than its obstacle.
Listen to episode 120 →Also with Ocean
Reading & Q&AUpcomingTime Is a Mother · Penguin Press, 2022
with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
MacArthur Fellowship, 2019
Vuong reads the nail salon chapter and talks about writing towards a reader you can never reach.
Loading countdown…
Reading & Q&AUpcomingOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous · Penguin Press, 2019
with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
MacArthur Fellowship, 2019
Vuong on writing badly on purpose, keeping the notebook ugly, and the line that took eleven months.
Loading countdown…
