Ask Penguin Podcast: Why do we still laugh when times are hard? With Ocean Vuong
I'm looking for a novel that reads like poetry - where should I start? Can you recommend a queer love story with a happy conclusion? What are the best books that explore small-town life? We put your book dilemmas to bestselling author Ocean Vuong and Penguin Editor and award-winning poet Sarah Howe.
In this episode, Rhianna is joined by Ocean Vuong, whose latest book The Emperor of Gladness has been dubbed the first 'millennial Great American Novel' – but what does that really mean, and which classic American novels have inspired him? The author and poet also reflects on the themes and inspirations behind the book, from small-town Connecticut to intergenerational friendships.
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Episode transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello, I am Rihanna Dillon, welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast all about books and the people that write and publish them. Every episode we sit down with authors and our penguin colleagues to hear all about what they're working on, what they're reading, and what inspires them. And you might just get a little book recommendation or two as well. Joining me today is award-winning poet essayist and novelist, ocean Vong, winner of the TS Elliot Prize for his collection Night sky with exit wounds. His debut novel on earth were briefly gorgeous, was a literary sensation going on to sell more than a million copies amongst many other accolades. He's the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant and the Whiting Award. The Emperor of Gladness is his beautiful new novel exploring themes of chosen family and the ways in which our lives can be changed by the most unexpected people set in the fictional fading post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, the story of opens with 19-year-old high standing on a railway bridge ready to jump.
When he hears someone shout across the river, the voice belongs to Grina, an elderly woman who is he soon realises succumbing to dementia. Over the course of a year, the pair develop a life-changing bond. Ocean. Welcome to Ask Penguin. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here. Thank you so much for being here. There is so much to get into, but let's start with the novels setting. So both geographically and temporally. So we're in 2009, quite a particular moment in place in modern America. You were also around the same age as 19-year-old high in 2009. What was it about this particular year time place that you wanted to lean into and how does it inform the shape of the book?
Ocean Vuong:
Well, I think maybe it takes me a long time to think about anything. So 16 years to think about it. If you ever want my Trump novel, it'll take another 16 years. We'll wait for that if we make it there. But I think 2009 was in retrospect, a very pivotal moment, I think in the 21st century for America. It was also the first time I had a political consciousness with the rise of the Obama years
And the quick disappointment in my generation with the Obama years occupy Wall Street came out and suddenly we heard that corporations are people too, that they're too big to fail. All of a sudden there's just more wars, drone strikes on children. And so the quick dismay from the burgeoning hope was that, wait a minute, perhaps it's not about who's in power, but America itself as a kind of illness that no matter who is in the White House working, poor people will suffer and we will be at war, which benefits the minority elites. And so that suddenly became a foundational moment for reckoning, what is this country? Because every generation must have their own reckoning.
Unfortunately, we live once, we have one consciousness and every person alive in America at least has to know that it was a country founded on indigenous death and slavery. Every generation a three-year-old must now learn that 50 years from now, another 3-year-old will have to come to that. So there's a cycle of reckoning, and I think 2009 was for me, a major reckoning.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And so what of your own life experiences were you particularly excited to introduce audiences to? Because obviously there are some real touchstones. You used to work in a fast food restaurant in the same way that High did, but that feels quite a universal experience. What were the smaller details that you wanted to share?
Ocean Vuong:
The kind of conversations one has in those spaces, I'm deeply interested in how speech acts subvert the conditions that they're in. So in a fast food restaurant, the architects who built it never expect people to talk about conspiracy theories or talk about their dreams and hopes and their confessions. And the fast food environment or any labour environment allows for a kind of kinship that I think you don't even see at home.
There are things that coworkers would tell each other that they would never tell their wife, their spouse, their children, or even their priest. There's enough anonymity but enough kinship, and we all know that by shifts end we will depart and we won't know where we live. And so I think that allows a kind of confession that is deeply interesting to me. And again, it's a subversive, it's almost like a Trojan horse. These speech acts are not supposed to happen, and they certainly never happen when the boss is around, and yet they do. And as a novelist, I'm really interested in the conditions for which people speak and who do they speak for and what a novel is a wonderfully capacious space to kind of map that out.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I'm so fascinated by the group dynamic that you create because as we say, anyone who's worked in an environment with those coworkers, whether it is like an office or a building site or a fast food restaurant, will recognise those quirky characters and those interactions, as you mentioned, the hierarchy as well within that. So how did you land on this particular group and how important are they to this formative year of high's life?
Ocean Vuong:
I think if you go into any fast food restaurant and talk to people, you'll find very similar folks. And I think it's because in a place like a fast food restaurant where the elephant in the room is that that's not where you want to be.
None of us want to be there. If you go into a corporation, if you go into a hospital, doctors and nurses, they work to get there, whether they like it or not, they still want to be there. They had a goal and they worked towards that. Similar to a university, a professor becomes a professor through years of deliberate training. But in a fast food restaurant, it's not exactly the central dream. There's another dream often deferred because of this labour. And so conversations are really interesting because after a while you start to realise that there's another desire that folks want to do and it's hard to talk about because it's never a promise that they will ever even hope to execute it. One of the characters here, the manager wants to be a professional wrestler. And so I think to me, that kind of surprise and a kind of illumination, which is what a novel can do, was really special in showcasing the humanity. I think one of the things about working in fast food is that your only value is to become a set of hands, your peer function. And I think that's why often our clients who are also from the working class, also poor coming to get cheap food, treat us so poorly because our humanity has been obfuscated by this functional mode of the corporation. And so I think that the novel is a wonderful place to kind of unearth those moments that are often hidden in the workplace
Rhianna Dhillon:
Descriptions that you write about in that and with the interactions as well are so incredibly vivid, like the taste of the chicken, the biting into the cornbread, the smells. How easy was it for you to take yourself back to those moments to sort of remember that for the first? The first, I think for high, the other ones that stay with you as a reader. So taking yourself back to your firsts.
Ocean Vuong:
I think description is political, how we describe the world reveals who we are. I also think these are also historical moments. The idea of fast food is a kind of in industrial phenomenon. There's a kind of sinister beauty to fast food as an American phenomenon in that for the first time, thanks to capitalistic industrialization, a billionaire and a houseless person can experience the McDonald's french fry. And it's the exact same thing. The promise of consistency, the illusion of just replication, replicating something that's been engineered. Exactly, it is. There's a kind of beauty to that. There's a kind of artistry and the horror is that it's all a deception, right? It's a kind of poison that destroys us. And so I think I'm obsessed with that kind of description. The food colouring, the sheen, how you describe the world reveals to the world who you are. In that sense, I think history is also fiction. It lies by omission. George Washington, that's the myth of the country. Mount Rushmore crossed the river to found the country, defeated the British and the Hessians, and yet no one told me at least that when his teeth fell out, he used the teeth of his slaves.
So America is really good at marketing itself to the world as a beacon of hope. It's interesting that America gets a dream, but you never hear about the Nigerian dream. You don't hear about the Vietnamese dream, the Nicaraguan dream. But I think America is so dependent on dream because the price of waking up is so costly, it's very origins, it's so bloody that in order to go on with it, one must keep dreaming because if you wake up, you realise it's a
Rhianna Dhillon:
Nightmare. There is so much tragedy in what you write, but it doesn't feel like a tragic book. You're not reading it. It doesn't feel bleak when you're reading it. There is hope, there is aspiration everywhere. So how are you able to write about that in a non-cynical way, sort of wanting and believing in this for your characters without knowing that they might never get there?
Ocean Vuong:
Thank you for clocking that. Well, my first novel was very serious because it was an artist statement novel, and it's also a letter to a son, to a mother who can't read. And so there's an urgency to that. Here are the things I need to tell you for which there is no language to explain it to you. And so humour and jokes would be kind of extraneous to that pressing project. This book, I was really inspired by Miyazaki's films and Studio Ghibli.
If you look at the heart of Miyazaki's conundrum as an artist, he was trying to develop a charming aesthetic that's soft full of levity in order to talk about some of the most rated art, brutal things of history, ecological despair, consumerism, existential crisis, the loss of morality and war, all of which post-war Japan post fascism was contending with. And so he was in this very specific crossroads wherein he had to use a soft kind of charming mode in order to talk about the toughest things for the next generation of Japanese children. And I was so inspired by that, and I just thought, gosh, I don't know if anyone has borrowed the ethos of animation to write literary fiction. I would say in some serendipitous way, some of Steinbeck's work is similar. Cannery Rowe and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. For some reason, I always see Holden Kew as an animation, and so I thought, that's interesting. Carson McCullers as well. The heart is the Lonely Hunter. I see that as a kind of animation. So it's a rarely touched upon thing. And I don't know if those writers intended that, but I thought, gosh, what if I were to be inspired by Miyazaki enough to kind of use a softer vignette in order to talk about some of the toughest things? It was also a response to my books being banned. I already wrote the serious devastating urgent novel,
And it was being challenged and banned all across the world in the American South as well. And so I had to say, well, I don't want my words to be censored or banned, but they will. And so I don't want my ideas to be censored or banned, so how do I get around this? I thought, what if I rewrote the same anxieties, the same obsessions that I tackled in the first book, but then cast it in a much more open way so that they couldn't, I think they'll abandon it anyway if they want to, but it made it a little more open, like a different strategy, a different mode so that children who don't have money can go to a public library and still access my books.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Incredible. It's sort of like a bait and switch almost.
Ocean Vuong:
Yeah,
Rhianna Dhillon:
This is a very lowbrow reference really in comparison. I sort of had that with BoJack Horseman thinking about animation, how that changed the scope of how you can talk about some of the most heartbreaking, terrifying, tragic things about life, but putting them into the mouths of talking animals.
Ocean Vuong:
A hundred percent. And South Park and the Simpsons, right. There's a great amount of subversion
Rhianna Dhillon:
In
Ocean Vuong:
All of that too. Yeah, that's brilliant.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You've sort of talked before about how you're so inspired by people and you have to be as a writer. You talked about you have to be a listener, but also being a writer can be very lonely and isolating as well. So how do you sort of counteract the two when you need to be surrounded by people to be inspired by them, to write about them and then go into a sort of writing hole?
Ocean Vuong:
Yeah, it's tough. I've always written at night, I think it comes out of this habit of always working two jobs. When I was younger going to school, I was never that person that could write in the daytime I was doing something else. But I think that's common for a lot of writers. We do our work by stealing time. I prefer it now it's quiet. No more emails, no more family to ask for things, and then you get the final word in the day, or at least you get the assumption that you do. But I think teaching has really helped me become a better thinker and have a kind of responsibility to at least 20 people, 20 students in my class that I can't just think in a whole, I have to think and then find a way to translate thought so that it's capacious as an invitation to avoid dogma and an adherence to rules and keep translating abstraction into something tangible as a sentence that could then be shared and worked through together collectively. So I think being a teacher is always in the back of my head. It is my 11th year now as a professor, and I always think when I look at something I say, how do I tell this to my students.
That's the greatest way to get yourself out of your head and into the sort of the public square. How would I explain this to my students? How do I get this point across? Because the classroom, it's a place of immense hope. I don't think a single student of mine ever stepped into a class cynical. They can be cynical about life, they can be cynical about education. But when you're in the class, the cynicism dissolves very quickly, especially in a creative writing workshop because a piece of writing comes in and within minutes we see it improve, right? It starts to shift and change and possibilities open. And it's almost like this amelioration of any sense of pessimism when you see a poem on a very humble scale starts to really come into itself.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Just thinking about then how you as a teacher, how do you measure success? How do you think about, you have students coming in who presumably they have a hope, they have a dream, they have an aim, they have an ambition, and it's your part of your job is to help facilitate, to make them better, to help them think what in their horizons, but you know that they might not all get to where they want to get to. How do you manage that? How do you manage expectations? How do you, I dunno, leave that kind of parting goodbye knowing that you might never hear from these incredible writers again?
Ocean Vuong:
Well, it's heartbreaking if you look at it on the traditional terms of publisher perish, which I think is quite silly, but also very faithful to American values, produce or die. But silence and transformation is also part of creativity. And so to me, I like to think of the work as a kind of process that everything is a process, that even this book, this is arbitrary as a final act. It's only final because there was a deadline I had to hand it in and then the material conditions of the book in a way, photographs it. So to me, a book is a photograph of someone's mind. In this case, maybe February, 2025 when my editor's like, please stop moving your commas. It's time to go to production. But if we get to a point where we don't need these things anymore and we can beam
New additions into our heads, I might do that too. So it's a material limitation of where we are to have a book. But everything is a process. And I have students who go, who've gone to publish amazing works. I've had students who published one book and they couldn't continue. I've had students who've never published anything. And there was one anecdote early on, maybe about eight years into my teaching, I met my first class of students. I was passing through this town and she said, come by. Funny thing is I'm now a flower farmer professor, would you come by and take a look at my farm and say hello? And I went to look at her farm and she took me into the fields. And there's these beautiful giant dahlias. They're just like a flower farm. When you buy a bouquet, you think, where does it come from? But it looks just like any other farm. There's just rows of produce. And then she got kind of quiet. And as a teacher, you kind of know when a student is feeling things. And I just said, Hey, what's going on? She starts weeping and she says to me, I'm so sorry I failed the impulse of our class, all the beauty, all of the possibility of that class is so important to me. I still think about it. But I stopped writing and I looked around and I said, Laura, the poem is here.
This dolla is the size of my face. Like the exact things that we as a class saw in your work, the wonder ambition, a kind of restlessness for innovation. It's just transferred into these flowers. This is the poem, this is the process. You've just mapped one process into another. And I think books somehow because of their finite borders, make us easily forget that all books at their best are porous. The ideas bleed through. And similarly, her poems bled into the very soil that she nourished. I never knew that until I came upon that moment. And so I think to me, I try not to say that I teach writing as a product, but I teach writing as a practise that you can use your whole life. And I asked her, I said, Lord, is poetry still important to you? Yes. So then you have succeeded. You can have the small frame of the checkbox writing a book, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's such a small frame. Why would you live by such a minuscule rubric when you have already succeeded, at least in my eyes, taking everything you've learned in the classroom and applied it to something much more prolific.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Did she take that on?
Ocean Vuong:
I hope so. But I think it was a reckoning for both of us, me as a teacher, because I didn't know that a student can end up there. And now many of my students end up in all kinds of play. But that was the first threshold for me where I was like, oh gosh, the poem. I was stunned at her work on the farm as soon as I got there, but I didn't know until she told me how she was feeling that I said, oh no, the poem is just transformed.
Rhianna Dhillon:
There are moments in this book that are so beautifully poignant. I mean, high lying to his mom about his life at college is one when he's never actually left the town. But it's really funny as well. There are so many moments of levity as you talked about. So how important was it to make sure that that was kind of dotted out throughout every scene? You can find moments in almost every scene, even when you think you're at an incredibly low moment with mental illness and brains disintegrating, you think you're so low, and then you'll pull something gorgeous out to make you smile.
Ocean Vuong:
Well, I think when you live on the margins, humour is not just a feeling, it becomes medicine. You corral it, you save it up, you hoard it in a way until you need it. And so it's often surprising when I talk about this around ideas of immigration and being refugees and coming from a war torn country or what have you. But the women in my family who survived all this were the easiest. They laughed at a drop of a dime, and often they laugh after describing horrifying things. It's a very unique circumstance. They can describe some of the things that would give you nightmares, and they would look around and just burst out laughing for no reason. And so I start to see inside the laugh, there's also this tiny scream after a while, I'm thinking of the monk painting of the scream. I think if you squint enough, it could also look like somebody laughing in hilarity. I think there's actually a lot of common ground inside the scream and the laugh and vice versa. And so to me, I wanted to kind of showcase again that method of humour, that it's not just entertainment, but it could actually be a mode of reorienting yourself and your body.
Rhianna Dhillon:
There's a scene where Gina and Haya involved in a shootout and you're reading it. He's horrifying to read and the detail, and then as it goes on, the relief and the levity comes out. But you can feel where the origins of it come from and the horror of where that really begins. But that I loved so much because we have children that grow up playing with fake guns pretending to kill each other. And then you're seeing this in adults. So I dunno, it's so impactful. It's a different kind of catharsis, I suppose.
Ocean Vuong:
Yeah, the role playing of wars.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But how important is the role of war in this book in particular?
Ocean Vuong:
Oh, it's everywhere. I think the role of war is part of American life. I mean, you try to rent an apartment and right away you're in a discourse of war, right? This is a post-war revival apartment. A realtor will say, this is a pre-war. This is an antebellum ranch. I'm like, oh, you mean a civil war plantation? Right? There's, that's a wild way of marketing it. A charming antebellum ranch where former slave quarters, you can use it. It's a big pickle. It's
Rhianna Dhillon:
Not the same
Ocean Vuong:
Veranda. But also you can measure American progress through war, post war, world War ii, world War I, artistic movements are measured around the timeline of war, the Vietnam era, protests, poetry, or what have you. And so I think it's a country that's really dependent on war for its identity and also the way it celebrates itself: you’re smashing it, you're killing it. You blew up when your first book came out, you blew up. I didn't know I was a grenade, right? But also, we use that as a way to make sense of the world too, for better and for worse. I'm not interested in policing it because I think there is no equivalent in America to celebrate someone than said, you killed it. I say it too, but I'm interested in asking why. I have a poem that clocks this violent language. And my Danish translators, they apologised to me. They said, well, we tried to say you're killing it. That girl's a grenade smash her. I effed her brains out. We try to piece by piece, translate that to Danish, but it sounded crazy. It was a Duolingo translation. So they just replicated the English on both sides. They said, the only way this will make sense to our readers is to keep it in English, but that speaks to how unique this American ethos is. And they said, I said, I hope you got paid the full price, the full fee, because you tried right? Hope they didn't pop off your money for doing that.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That is fascinating, genuinely fascinating.
Ocean Vuong:
So war isn't everything for better or for worse,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hard. Hi. And Gina's relationship is at the core of the book. I think we are so often so impatient and intolerant of other generations, especially it feels like, especially now, but perhaps we always have. I think we always have been. But what do you think that we can learn from each other, and how prevalent is that in your writing about that need to learn from the old and the young?
Ocean Vuong:
Well, I lived in a household where we were raised by women, three generations in one household. And it's a very common thing for immigrants in general, mostly because the home culture values that. But also, we couldn't afford multiple apartments. So in practicality, we didn't even have a sense of a bedroom or a living room. Everything was public space. We all slept in the living room. We prepared meals in the living room, everything spilled over. The kitchen was just so, there was just kind of one open hallway. There was a one bedroom, but it was just kind of more of the same. And I grew up with my grandmother, and I was very surprised that in the West, we usually shut people away when they're no longer functional or when they lose themselves. And so I thought it was really a great discordance.
And I thought, what would happen if there's this clash of cultures between a young Vietnamese man and an elder Lithuanian woman whose family is trying to push her into the homes? But again, that's also very quintessential of American values, which is if you're not published or perish exist or be gone, contribute or be stored away. And so these homes are fortresses that hide the ageing body. It became very evident a few years ago when President Carter was wheeled out to his wife's funeral, and the visceral response from the American public was like, why would you do that? There was no sympathy for a man who's mourning and want to pay respects to his wife, but more about why should we have to see such an elderly person? Why should we have to witness the ageing process on public television? This is a violence, the ideals of who we are.
Rhianna Dhillon
That’s horrific
Ocean Vuong:
But I think it was an incredibly important moment to realise that yes, this is where we're all headed. This is the only truth that I think we can really tangibly locate, is that death is a threshold we'll all head towards and pass
Rhianna Dhillon:
Through. Grina is Lithuanian, as you mentioned, and there was a real grina, is that correct? Your partner Peter's grandmother.
Ocean Vuong:
Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But so how much research did you do into Lithuanian traditions separately from what she had told you?
Ocean Vuong:
Yeah, a lot of research. It's important for me to not tell anyone's story.
Even with my first book, A lot of folks are like, that's a memoir, right? It's like, no, because I have never interviewed my family for my art. I've never interviewed Grina for my art. To me. I mean, other novelists have different takes, but for me, I don't have the right to tell someone's story, but I'm inspired by their situation in the same way Tolstoy was inspired by the Russian aristocracy, but I don't replicate their lives and stories, same with the first book and this book as well. So I was inspired by her life and what I knew of it. But there are things that she told me that she has taken to the grave I will take to my grave. I do think that is sacred. I don't believe that me as a novelist gives me full reign at exposing people's lives. They should have a chance to tell it. And if they don't, that's up to them. So the task for me is transformation and invention at all costs to then almost build a simulation, something that approximates what I've lived through, but is animated completely by the imagination. So a deep dive into Lithuanian history, particularly between Stalin and Hitler during World War II was really edifying for this work. And even for the first book, a lot of research goes into it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, there is the scene which feels so deeply like real with the bread rolls in the rain.
Ocean Vuong:
Was
Rhianna Dhillon:
That something that you did do? No. So where did that come
Ocean Vuong:
From? Oh God, that came from my life. So I mean, a novel was kind of like a Henry James called 'em loose baggy monsters. And I think a novel was very forgiving because it keeps holding whatever you throw at it. But I think novelization is very important because the key is implementation. And I think some auto fiction only replicates without implementation. It just, oh, this is what I've seen, I felt, and let me just take it, put it on the page, and then becomes something. And I think you need some sort of strategy and even contrivance to make art throb. Otherwise it becomes reportage, which is not a bad thing. But in this case, it's a long story. But I'll just say I encountered years ago while walking in Philadelphia, a stack of croissants at the bottom of a tree near a sidewalk, like stacked strangely into this perfect pyramid. And there was ants crawling all over it. And then something came over me and I towed it. So they collapsed and I started crushing them. And then an insane amount of delight surged through my being. And I spent the next 10 minutes stomping on these croissants.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh my goodness.
Ocean Vuong:
And I think there's something about the subconscious, and there's things about us that we don't know until we encounter the world. And as a novelist, I can say to you, oh, well, the croissant as a quintessential symbol of French colonial power, upon seeing it, my ancestors propelled me to then enact this symbolic revenge and destroy this magical universal export of the empire. But that would be revisionist history. And I think the truth is deep down inside, I am a 12-year-old, but that came in because I just wanted the characters to have that same delight that I felt, but you had to implement it. And so that scene had to be orchestrated and then made sort of possible and plausible in a way, so you couldn't just narrate the same thing. So I think that's kind of the difference between reportage and fiction is that you have to ask yourself, well, okay, I have this thing that's interesting. How do I build the connective tissue so that it feels completely absorbed by this world? And if it doesn't absorb, I have to cut it out. I'm
Rhianna Dhillon:
So glad I asked.
Ocean Vuong:
Hey, don't knock it until you try it. You're having a bad day. Step on a croissant. It's better than Klonopin, I tell you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So your book has been described as the first millennial great American novel. I've seen that somewhere. So that's an incredible thing to have said about your work. Is that something, we were talking about generations. Were you specifically thinking about the millennial experience when you were writing this?
Ocean Vuong:
I think so. I don't know much about what a great American novel. I still don't know what that means or what it is. I think it's as silly as the American dream. It's this kind of white whale we're all chasing, but we don't really know how to define it. And maybe like the white whale, we will destroy ourselves in the quest. But I feel like a book is a product of its time. And it took me a long time to learn how to write, and I wanted to use the tools that I acquired to address a time that felt really potent to me. I think the millennial generation is really interesting because we were the first generation to grow up analogue and then have a young adulthood with the iPhone. So the arrival at the iPhone in our twenties after having a very analogue childhood was I think akin to the arrival of the T Model Ford to folks in the early 20th century wherein a week prior you're riding a horse and then two weeks later you're driving a machine. And I think the further we grow from that era will realise how pivotal it is that we have an analogue memory,
But we live in the digital age.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So there's no point in asking you if you have a great American novel that you think of as the Great American.
Ocean Vuong:
I don't know if it's a great American novel in a traditional sense, but I go back to Moby Dick because it set the tone of possibility that I think is actually rarely replicated. Because from Melville's, Moby Dick published in 1851, a novel that borrows a kind of essayistic approach, naturalistic approach, nature writing, diagramming whale shapes, scientific exegesis of anatomy, but also theological quest, borrowing from Shakespeare's monologue, character study, travel log. It did everything. And I think that's probably why it failed commercially in its time. It was too strange, but it's the ultimate permission giver. And the sentences were richly baroque. You can feel that Melville was trying to use the sentence to almost like a root system. And then in the 20th century, we started to turn the sentence into pure representation. The sentence fell back to behaving more like a butler. It should be lucid prose that serves the story gets out of the way. Inconspicuousness, right? So going back to Melville, I don't know if it's a great American novel, but it gives the great American permission to really see the book as a laboratory of experimentation rather than a performance of calcified ideals. And I think somewhere we did lose a lot of that in the mid-century production where novels became kind of quiet, suburban contemplative vaccinations in a kind of prose that mimics the newspaper. That's where a lot of that comes out of the newspaper really changed prose because the writing had to be efficient. It had to just serve story and not point to itself. Also, it had to make room for advertising. So commercial anxieties quickly entered, and I think controlled and coerced prose, writing poetry is a different story,
But prose had to really conform. And you see that with Hemingway and Stein who wrote for newspapers, Joan Didion and Stephen Crane especially, who was also a reporter. But going back, I think if you read Melville, you have permission to really do anything you want. And that's really important.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The Emperor of Gladness and all of oceans are the titles are available now from wherever you get your books. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about that was gorgeous. I loved all of that. Talk about everything it
Ocean Vuong:
Felt like Thank you for tolerating my yapping. It's a pleasure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
As well as fascinating author conversations, we love our listeners to leave with loads of inspiration of what to read next. Every episode we put your reading requests to our guests. So joining me and Ocean now to help answer some of those questions is Penguin colleague Sarah Howe. Sarah's first collection loop of Jade on the TS Elliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, her follow-up collection for tokens continues to explore the ideas and complications of belonging, identity and inheritance. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations on the new collection as well. Thank you so much. We have just here, tell us a little bit more about it.
Sarah Howe:
So it's been 10 years in the making. It's my second collection and it sort of picks up where my first book left off, but also where revises and sees in a new light, the various bits of family history that I grappled with in that first book, especially the figure of my mom who was abandoned as a baby in China and sort of tenuously adopted. And so these poems think about the way that that trauma still reverberates in later generations, including I suppose the children I've now had in those 10 years.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So 10 years in the making is a decade is an incredibly long time there works in there that you penned at the beginning of that decade or have they all sort of been formulating over that time and were written later in that decade?
Sarah Howe:
There are things from the full span, but it did snowball I a long period of creative silence where I think I was rather cowed by both the success of my first book and the sort of quite fierce response it had in other quarters. There was a bit of a sort of racialized fury about it, and I felt very exposed and vulnerable for some years.
And so I did come back to poetry, but it's really only been in the last five years or so. And the very last poem in the book, a long one, I wasn't sure if I wanted to write until the very end. So really it came to together in the last fortnight before, oh my goodness, I had to send it off to print, which I don't recommend to anyone, but it did mean that it sort of almost flowed out like a gift from the gods almost. And that's where the core of this grappling with my mom and the history of my grandmother happens really. So I sort of felt like it's the last minute, it's now or never.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, that sounds like quite an incredible way to write. So before we get on with the audience question, tell us a little bit more about your role here at Penguin.
Sarah Howe:
So I'm the poetry editor at Chatto in Windus, which is an imprint at Penguin. And so I have the privilege of working with our amazing list of poets sometimes from quite far out. I sort of act as a sounding board for early ideas about a collection, and it means working with everyone from debut poets who might only have ever done a reading on stage once or twice to veterans who've got 15 books behind them.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Is there a title that you're really excited about working on this year?
Sarah Howe:
Oh yes. I mean, I will always have a soft spot in my heart. For the first ever book I acquired as an editor, which came out earlier this year. It's called Minks by Karen Dans Barton, who is an Anglo romany poet. It has a continuous story to it really. It talks about her childhood on the edge of society. Her mum was a sex worker. They moved from pillar to post. Every time that's discovered, they go to a new town. But the rest of the book, Karen and her black half-sister find themselves abandoned to the care system. So they grow up in children's homes where they're forcibly separated from one another. It's an amazing collection.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds amazing. That does sound incredible. Are there any myths about poetry that you would like to bust?
Sarah Howe:
Well, the first one would probably be that it's too difficult to be open and welcoming to everyone. I suppose that is a myth that I try every day to bust with the poets that I publish, that the complexity of their poems at the same time as the singing simplicity is something really special. And I think the way that poetry now moves through the world on social media and on stage and touches hearts in these new ways is a testament to that really
Rhianna Dhillon:
Our listeners have been writing in with their brilliant questions. Our first one is from Lois, who wants to know really easy one. What are you reading right now? Ocean.
Ocean Vuong:
I am rereading Mark Fisher's ghost of my life, notes on depression and ology. Very lovely,
Hopeful work. I say that sarcastically. I was like, oh, that's so not what the title suggests. Oh, but very edifying. I mean, Fisher who sadly took his own life in 2014, I believe was a British theorist. And he very helpfully kind of brings this very provocative notion that there is no 21st century, it's only the 20th century in high def. And so there's a kind of recycling of ideas and that recycling as a kind of haunting, that we are haunted by our lost futures. Everything that the enlightenment and technology promise is actually destroying us now, right? All of the progress of civilization, all of the hope of technological advance from the enlightenment and industrialization led to the gas chambers led to labour abuses, international warfare, drone strikes. So we have kind of lost the promise of our future. And so there's kind of, he calls it reflexive, impotence that new generations are now opting out of attempting to build anything, not because they're lazy or they're indifferent, but because they know it's rigged from the star. And so it's a very punk ideal, but it's really helpful to think now. And I would what a great loss because I just thought, what would he say
Now in
Rhianna Dhillon:
2025? Fascinating. Thank you. Sarah, what about you? What are you reading at the
Sarah Howe:
Moment? I've just finished a book that's another sort of haunting, I suppose. Aaron Dotty, Roy's amazing memoir. Mother Mary comes to me. For me, God of small things was a literally life-changing book. And to see it sort of reprised and replayed the real life behind the fiction in Mother Mary is really quite something. But you're not sure whether she's trying to resurrect her mother or exercise her because it was such a difficult relationship with really brutal points and had moments of estrangement and abandonment. And so there's such beautiful emotional complexity in this book.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's a really great shout. Someone is looking for a book that turns the unfulfilled queer longing trope on its head. So a queer story with a happy conclusion. What would you recommend?
Sarah Howe:
I actually have the perfect answer to this. Excellent. And it happens to be another book that I've worked on this year. It's by an British Argentine poet called Leo Boish, and it's called Southern Most Sonnets. And it talks about his migration story coming from Buenos Aires to the uk. But its heart is a gay love story. And can you believe it, that Leo falls in love with a young man, Pablo, who is straight, has a girlfriend at the time, and turning this trope of unfulfilled longing on its head. Through the course of their friendship, Pablo realises that he's gay and they get together and then a few years later they're married and it's the most beautiful, fulfilling, gorgeous love story. One of the most brilliant treatments in poetry of gay love I've seen. Really.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds beautiful. Thank you so much for that question as well. Which books would you recommend that examine and explore small town life? I think that's a great one. It's so universal, isn't it?
Sarah Howe:
So I am going to reach back a little bit. There's this really iconic American poet called Richard Hugo. His muse was sort of small town, Midwest life, especially little towns in Montana where he grew up. And he has this iconic poem called Degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg, which talks about the depressed industry and depressed people of existence there. And it has this line, the principles supporting business now is rage, which I think just speaks through the decades to where we are today, doesn't it?
Rhianna Dhillon
Yeah.
Sarah Howe:
And Hugo also wrote this amazing craft book called The Triggering Town, where he develops this metaphor of passing through a small town you don't know, so not your hometown and imagining the lives and existences of the people who've lived there. And that he says is how it should be as a writer when you come on your own unique inspiration.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's fascinating. I sort of have that. I love exploring, I love exploring the uk. I've also driven across America, and you do when you are travelling those distances, you do drive in and out. You spend a couple of hours at a coffee shop or just sustenance, and you do see all these people from different walks of life. It must be so inspirational as a writer to do something like that and to find where the humanity is in different pockets of the world. Love that question as well. Another listener asks, can you recommend a modern novel that reads like poetry? Sarah, do you want to start us
Sarah Howe:
Off? I was going to be cheeky about this and recommend a book that I suppose has been published as a novel but is inverse. And so it sort of reads like poetry for obvious reasons, by a brilliant young writer called Ella Frees. It was published by Rough Trade last year, and it's called Good Lord and Email. And it's this sort of romp through precarious rental accommodation that somehow opens up onto this bigger picture, which is all about sexual assault and finding a room of one's own as a female writer. And I really, really recommend it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds brilliant. Maybe a bit too close to ho with the rental studio. Ocean. Do you have a suggestion for
Ocean Vuong:
This one? I always go back to Theresa ha cha dti at times called a novel at times called an Exhibition a Documentation. And I think again, you read that and you say, oh, I could do anything. I could do whatever I want. And it borrows from poetry, myth, re reportage, documentation, images, and it really presents the novel at its sort of nebulous origins, which as a form that came latest after drama, after historiography, after Epic and lyric poetry, the conditions of what the novel is is still open. And that book really honours that sort of watery borders that the novel is, and it's really deeply inspiring to me.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you. And finally, we've had a question sent in which it is a tough one to answer, but we've all been asked it. What's your all time favourite book? And that's from Joanna.
Sarah Howe:
I wondered if it was a cop out to say, ocean's own first book of Foam Night Sky with exit wounds, the way that Ocean was talking about a book that opens up possibilities and enables you, I definitely felt that and the recognition of a kindred spirit that let me see things and possibilities in myself and my own writing I hadn't known before. If that's a cop out, another book in that category for me is Jory Graham, another American poets select poems, dream of the Unified Field, which just changed my life and the way that I think and write about things. It showed me the way that you can think and feel in a poem at the same time. And I found that a revelation, she, I think is probably the only Nobel level poet working in the States at the moment and should be much more read over here.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Give us the title one more time.
Sarah Howe:
Dream of the Unified Field.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfect. Thank you so very much for joining us. Thank you to Ocean Vong and Sarah Howell and to everybody who has sent us a question. I hope this episode has inspired you to dig out some new reads, links, and information on all of the books that we've talked about today. And on Ocean and Sarah's work are available in the show notes. I'm going to be back in fortnight with more authors and ask Penguin questions and answers. Thank you so much for listening and in the meantime, happy reading.