Interview with Ansley Moon

Ansley Moon was born in New Delhi, India, and has since lived on three continents. Her work has been published in PANK, J Journal, Southern Women's and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, How to Bury the Dead, was published by Black Coffee Press. She is the recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and works as an editor for Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

You attended your first Kundiman retreat with your fellow readers Wo Chan and Tung-Hui Hu, in 2012. What's one memory or takeaway that you have from that retreat?

The Kundiman retreat is a sacred place. For me, it altered my relationship to poetry and it made me believe that my voice was necessary.  I also remember Wo and Hui-Hui’s transformative reading. I feel privileged to read alongside them at the Kundiman & Verlaine Reading.

You attended the New School for your MFA. How has your writing life changed since then? How has it remained the same?

My MFA program made me a stronger writer by pushing me to take my work seriously. Before my writing program, my writing life was a solitary one. Now, I have a group of friends that inspire and challenge me to be a better writer and person. 

Can you talk a little about how you balance your teaching life and your writing life?

I think that the key to balancing any job and writing is setting strict parameters and differentiating your “work” time from your writing time. I do this by striving to complete all my teaching related tasks at my job so that my evenings and weekends are free to write. Some weeks are better than others, and this is the first year that I feel I am balancing writing and teaching. I write everyday and revise and submit writing on the weekend. While teaching can be a grueling vocation, I am passionate about education. My students inspire me by sharing their poetry.

Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we're interested in any first memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

I was born in India and adopted into a white, Southern family. From an early age, I learned that “belonging” meant complicating traditional narratives. For me, being raised in the South was a constant trauma that forever marked me. I am always navigating race and identity. 

In Monique Truong’s book, Bitter in the Mouth, she states: “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.” Writing has always been my way of navigating my place in the world.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a poetry manuscript about adoption, race, and infanticide in India and a long poem about my father.

What are some favorite books (movies or art) that you would recommend?

There are too many books to name! Recently I read Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo and The Father by Sharon Olds. I would recommend both! I am also interested in the way that art, music and dance intersect poetry. Wim Wenders’ film Pina especially comes to mind.

Ansley Moon will be reading with Wo Chan and Tung-Hui Hu at Kundiman & Verlaine on Sunday, November 17th at 4pm.  Check out the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1375415046033941/?source=1 

Please note that we decided to hold a fundraiser at this event. Proceeds from this reading will benefit Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Relief in the Philippines. So, please come and open up your hearts as well as your pockets. The Philippines is in dire need. Every bit counts.

Interview with Tung-Hui Hu

Poet and media scholar Tung-Hui Hu was born in San Francisco and educated at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Berkeley. His collections of poetry include The Book of Motion (2003); Mine (2007), which won the Eisner Prize; and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (2013). He is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

You taught at the Kundiman retreat where the other Verlaine readers Ansley Moon and Wo Chan attended as Fellows, in 2012. What's one memory or takeaway that you have from that retreat?

I remember a lot of things (the stained glass windows of the room where we held Hour Number 5 of workshop, dinner being just a short intermission; the final party, branded “Kundiman 2012: I am the Warrior”). But mostly I remember how exhausted I’d been with poetry before I arrived, not unlike so many others I met at the retreat who were suffering from post-MFA burnout. It was, as Truong Tran described it, as if we had been filled with other people’s words and thinkings about poetry to the point that we barely recognized our own language as ours. Kundiman let me shed this baggage and start again.

I’ve heard (I hope I’m not totally mistaken!) that you teach in Michigan, but also shuttle back and forth between Ann Arbor and the Bay Area. How is it living in more than one place? How does it/how has it impact(ed) your work?

I’m on research leave in San Francisco this year, and next year I’ll be back full-time at Michigan. Even though I don’t really live in two places at once, I don’t mind shuttling back and forth between them when I need to. I schedule urgent work—a graduate student thesis, a must-finish essay, or a conference call—around planes and airports; the no-place of travel, the banality of the food, is somehow productive for me. A friend says that she loves flying because all the decisions that might cause anxiety are taken out of the equation. I don’t own a TV, but I often teach television in my undergraduate classes, so all the second-rate shows that I’ve consumed in-flight make me feel strangely virtuous.

Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: Would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we’re interested in any first memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

Just thinking about the white supremacist who found out he is 14% black, I find it interesting that we’ve begun to link race to genetic testing and bloodwork. In that process, race gets understood as a code to be decrypted from the data, a secret of the body that is made to speak. I’m not sure what this means, but I do find that one of the joys of writing is to take up race with much more subtlety. It’s concerned less with uncovering at a truth than, as you point out, questions of belonging, which continue to exist long after the secret of race is ‘uncovered.’

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a publishing project called the Office for Net Assessment. ONA is a lab for figuring out the role of print books in the digital age, and to this end, we’ve started to solicit material from artists, game designers, scholars, and writers (such as multilingual poetry written for border crossings by Amy Sara Carroll) who can help us experiment with potential answers. I’m also finishing an academic book on the pre-history of the digital cloud, and starting a new book of poetry on forests. The original word ‘forest’ had nothing to do with trees, but comes from the word ‘foreign,’ meaning outside the rule of law; the prison camp at Guantanamo would be, in this sense, a forest.

What are some favorite books (movies or art) that you would recommend?

I initially misread this question as asking about my favorite movie books (in response I could only come up with Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion). Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey is one of the few books I brought with me to California: essays for people who don’t necessarily like essays. As for poetry, I have Maged Zaher’s Thank You for the Window Office and Evie Shockley’s The New Black next up on my shelf.

The last artworks that stayed with me came out of a visit to Cai Guo-Qiang's Cultural Melting Bath, essentially a hot tub/sculpture with rocks and floating herbs. Sitting in our bathing suits, we struck up a conversation with a family from Jakarta, who graciously invited us to visit. A half-year later, we found ourselves introduced to several of West Java’s up-and-coming artists (in one corner of Cecilia Patricia Utario’s studio: hand-blown glass condom chandeliers) and walking through an old art gallery originally built by Dutch East Indies colonialists to display European masters. But now it was filled with a spectacular collection of Indonesian new media art, including a wickedly funny Andy Warhol remake, Yusuf Ismail’s “Eat Like Andy”. The family’s hospitality continues to amaze. Moral of the story: always accept propositions made in hot tubs, particularly if they involve art.

Tung-Hui Hu will be reading with Wo Chan and Ansley Moon at Kundiman & Verlaine on Sunday, November 17th at 4pm.  Check out the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1375415046033941/?source=1 

Please note that we decided to hold a fundraiser at this event. Proceeds from this reading will benefit Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Relief in the Philippines. So, please come and open up your hearts as well as your pockets. The Philippines is in dire need. Every bit counts. 

Interview with Nina Sharma

Nina Sharma is a writer from Edison, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Certain Circuits Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, and Ginosko Literary Journal. She recently was awarded a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her nonfiction. With Quincy Scott Jones, she co-created the Noreaster Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. She is currently attending Columbia University's MFA in writing program and working on her first book. 

Cathy Linh Che: I know that you are now attending Columbia for your MFA program. How has your work changed during the course of the MFA? How has it remained the same?

Nina Sharma: I’m actually starting next week!  This world isn’t entirely new to me though.  I have a master’s in American Studies.  I think I began to find my footing as a writer during the course of that program.  It was a little bit of a discovery period for me—honing in on the issues and themes I care most about and how I’d like to attend to them.  I took chances.  I slipped in creative writing when I could, brought pop culture into conversations otherwise reserved for canonical works, and vice versa.  I felt a newfound charge in my writing as I did.  While I was working along these lines prior to my program, shifting into that new space, with a new audience, made me realize that the best writing comes out of a sense of risk.  I kind of take that with me whether I am working in a program or outside of it. 

CLC: Could you tell me a little about your life pre-MFA? What made you decide to apply and attend one?

NS: For the most part, up until like a year or so ago actually, I was more of what I call a secret writer.  I always wanted a professional writing life but I wasn’t sure it would happen.  Most of my family members are in healthcare in some way.  Only three out of the fourteen of us cousins pursued something else.  Even though I didn’t take a science track and wrote throughout my life, I always struggled to see this as something very real and possible. I owe a huge debt to Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where I worked for a few years.  Meeting other writers of similar backgrounds and who engaged with similar themes, who pushed their work across bounds I could not even fathom yet, connecting with like-minded organizations such as Cave Canem and Kundiman along the way, I felt excited and hopeful in a way I hadn’t before.  Being part of a writing community full time for two years is a real gift, to not have to fight for that time or qualify it in any way.

CLC: Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: Would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we're interested in any gut reactions, memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

NS: At the risk of sounding Mad Libby, I would say that writing, in particular reflecting on race and identity, gives me a sense of belonging more than anything else.  I am a shy person and I think I have written my way out of the silences in my life.  I am thinking of the times when my loved ones do not consider the traumas they have suffered to be worth acknowledging and also times when I fail to acknowledge my own.  I am, like many first generation South Asian Americans, an inheritor of silences, we absorb them and later, learn to read between them, just as we learn to negotiate the two worlds we exist in— the world of our home and family and the one outside of it, in which the former is often rendered invisible.  It is that threshold between the two worlds that is most like home to me, the closest I’ve felt to belonging.  That is where I write from.

CLC: What are you currently working on?

NS: I am working on a series of essays reflecting on my relationship with my husband, Quincy Scott Jones, meditating on our experiences as an interracial couple— he being African American and I, South Asian.  I reflect upon moments in our life and also engage with broader histories that speak our experiences; in particular surprising, idiosyncratic connections I found as I looked into things further.  It’s been exciting, discovering so much even as I write our own story.

CLC: Do you have any poetry (or art or music) recommendations?

NS: The writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maxine Hong Kingston, and James Baldwin are particularly inspiring to me. They are and always will be, to take a line from Kingston's Woman Warrior, my swordsmen and swordswomen. Speaking more contemporarily, the work of Minter Krotzer, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Bushra Rehman, whose wonderful debut novel Corona came out earlier this year, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Hal Sirowitz, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan are always close by me and Quincy’s The T-Bone Series is right at the heart.

Nina will be reading at Kundiman & Verlaine this Sunday, September 8th with Jenny Xie and Sho Sugita. Facebook event here and more event info here.

Interview with Sho Sugita

Sho  Sugita lives in Brooklyn, NY. He works as a medical manuscript translator and studies poetry at Brooklyn College. He was an invited musician/reader in 2012 for Les Souffleurs de Vers: deuxième edition in Grenoble, France to raise funds for the 3-11 Tohoku disaster. His creative work can be found in Washington Square and Endless Possibilities (Classical and New Music on WRSU). He is currently working on a translation manuscript of Hirato Renkichi and Kanbara Tai, two poets active during the Japanese Futurist Movement of the early 1920s.

Cathy Linh Che: I've heard that you are now attending Brooklyn College for your MFA program. How has your work changed during the course of the MFA? How has it remained the same?

Sho Sugita: I used to attempt at verse. I now think about how to rupture them.

CLC: Could you tell me a little about your life pre-MFA? What made you decide to apply and attend one?

SS: I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008, which was obviously a bad time for finding jobs. This was especially true for the Midwest. I had an offer to pursue an MFA in music at Mills, but it didn’t make too much sense to go into debt at the time. I moved to Japan due to the dire prospects for seeking employment in the US and ended up becoming an orthopedic sales representative. I decided that I wanted to reapply for school when I entered my late-20s. There was a lot of downtime with the nature of my work, so I was writing a lot during my waiting hours at outpatient lounges. The pursuit of writing made more sense than music with my work-related constraints in Japan.

CLC: Kundiman has an ongoing Kavad project this year called Writing Race and Belonging: Would you mind spending some time discussing your relationship to writing, race, and belonging? Broad topic, I know, but we're interested in any gut reactions, memories, thoughts, or impressions you have when you think about those three ideas.

SS: To answer your question directly, I have a tendency to question the authority of how we canonize literature—especially in regards to race and belonging—that probably stems out of my interest in Frank Chin’s “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” as a teenager. I never liked the term “Classics” in literature and its implications of the Western cannon, but I’ve learned over the years that there is just as much to talk about “what we don’t talk about.” 

I’m currently interested in the study of Modernism. With that said, the term scholars tend to use a lot in the field is “transatlantic” to describe the transmission of fin de siècle as a spirit of the time. I want to provide examples that “transcontinental” might be a more accurate modifier to describe the era. Fortunately, the academic climate is moving in a similar direction. For example, I think this year’s interest around Chicago Review’s criticism of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by Kent Johnson is a necessary discussion to have—that inclusion has improved over the years, but to question if it is enough.

The same could be said about attitudes in poetry circles and small presses. When I was an undergraduate, I remember Ed Roberson was kindly suggesting to me that I should try to find Asian-American writing communities, but little was visible to me back in 2007. Kundiman’s programming is a testament to the changes I’m seeing.

CLC: What are you currently working on?

I recently finished a translation manuscript of Hirato Renkichi Shishū, a posthumous selection of poems by a Japanese Futurist poet. I spent some time over the summer in Tokyo at the Museum of Modern Literature, and I realized that I could collect Modernist and Proletariat coterie journals from the 1910s-1920s to compile a “Collected Works of Hirato Renkichi.” I should be finished with that project in a month or so. Hopefully, some of the poems will be available for readers in the near future. One can find an excellent translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement by Miryam Sas in Cabinet Magazine (Issue 13).

SS: Do you have any poetry (or art or music) recommendations?

Poetry: O-Bon by Brandon Shimoda, Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy, the recent Northwestern World Classics edition of Mayakovsky’s Selected Poems. I would also recommend John Solt’s translations of Kitasono Katue in Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space. I’ve read that there’s going to be a translation of Gozo Yoshimasu by Sayuri Okamoto with creative interventions by Forrest Gander, which is exciting to hear. Here’s an amazing reading of Yoshimasu’s “Ancient Observatory” from 1985: http://vimeo.com/31991414

Art: Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, and Modernism in the Russian Far East and Japan 1918-1928

Music: Odori by radicalfashion (Hirohito Ihara), Perfect Lives by Robert Ashley, Obscure Tape Music of Japan 1: Aoi no Ue by Joji Yuasa, Tomomi Adachi’s sound poetry performances on PennSound. I’ve also heard from a professor in the MFA program that Jay-Z is great.

Bushra Rehman interview now up at The Village Voice

Congrats to our dear Bushra! 

Read the article here: bit.ly/15hr8PS 

Bushra Rehman's first novel, Corona, is a fragmented, poetic, on-the-road adventure told from the perspective of the charismatic Razia Mirza. After coming of age in a tight Muslim community surrounding the first Sunni Masjid built in New York City, a rebellious streak leads to Razia's excommunication, prompting the young heroine to flee. Stories that alternate between childhood memories and the misadventures of her young adulthood slowly reveal glimpses of the past that Razia is escaping and the Queens neighborhood that has shaped her life.

Rehman's poems, stories, and essays have been featured on  BBC  radio and in the New York Times, among other publications, and she co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Here, via e-mail, she talks about the Muslim community in her native borough, being a new mother, and why her protagonist aspires to be shameless.