with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
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Add to calendarVuong on writing badly on purpose, keeping the notebook ugly, and the line that took eleven months.
He photocopied a notebook page and handed it round. The crossings out got a bigger reaction than the finished poem.
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
WorkshopUpcomingNight Sky with Exit Wounds · Copper Canyon Press, 2016
with Ocean Vuong, Poet & novelist
MacArthur Fellowship, 2019
Vuong on writing prose at the pace of poetry, and refusing to apologise for it.
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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.
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