Hybrid Forms & Becoming with Jennifer S. Cheng
Interview w/ Jennifer S. Cheng
Jennifer S. Cheng received her BA from Brown University, MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, and MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly and Entropy magazine; HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press), a chapbook in which fragments of text, photographs, found images, and blank space converge to create meaning. She is a 2019 National Endowment of the Arts Fellow, U.S. Fulbright scholar, Kundiman fellow, Bread Loaf work-study scholar, and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Award, the Ann Fields Poetry Award, the Mid-American Review Fineline Prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry, lyric essays, and image-text work appear in Tin House, AGNI, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, The Volta, Sonora Review, Seneca Review, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN HK anthology), and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in rapture of the coastal prairies of northern California. Twitter @mooncake
I recently read MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, a hybrid collection selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, published in 2018. The book mixes “fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary [and…] draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang’E (the Lady in the Moon).” A friend who’d published an excerpt of the book had recommended it to me for my interested in myth, fable and, more and more, hybrid or otherwise unclassifiable texts. MOON certainly delivers on those aspects but, more, it truly enchants. No more than a few pages in, I felt compelled to continue—to sink into the language and the longing it holds, to make space for it to shift and move, to allow it to continue transforming, becoming, over the course of reading.
No sooner had I finished MOON than I was ordering the book for friends and family, and emailing Jennifer S. Cheng if she might be so generous as to talk with me about the book and hybrid writing broadly—what that can open in terms of the text, and our processes.
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Mackenzie Suess: Thank you for sharing your time to speak with me. To start, you’re considered a “hybrid” writer. MOON renders traditional boundaries between prose and poetry porous, narrative shape and linearity flexible, and crisscrosses between and fuses the personal and the mythic . Yet, “hybrid” is an inherently fluid concept. What does the term hybridity mean to you? Do you find the term itself a help or hindrance?
Jennifer S. Cheng: Thank you so much for the kindness and invitation. Genre boundaries, like many boundaries, are constructs; they serve a function and help us to think and talk about writing, but no one can pinpoint exactly where one genre ends and another begins. For some writers, our natural language falls in blurry, in-between places within these constructs, so it becomes important not to feel hindered by them. Hybrid is a word that helps give this murky space a name within the discourse, but it is also, as you say, fluid. I am not terribly attached to this term or any term, really; I use it to help signal expectations, but all I truly care about is that I get to write in whatever language/form I need, regardless of prevailing boundaries. This is how I feel: genre boundaries are useful in certain contexts, but it is necessary to recognize that they are fluid and culturally, socially, ideologically situated.
MS: Can you talk a little bit about the genre(s) you first started writing in and how that genre has shifted or expanded over time for you? What has been your journey in coming to hybridity, or have you always found yourself writing between categories?
JSC: I’ve mentioned this in other places, but when my undergraduate writing teacher introduced me to the lyric essay, I recognized it immediately, deep down inside my body. It was like finding something I had been unconsciously looking for my entire life—a form to hold my way of navigating and interpreting the world, one that sought to understand the complexities of existence by way of, or at least alongside, silences, holes, leaps, fragments, shadows, atmospheres of rhythm and tone. The lyric essay felt to me then, as it does now, like a form that is haunted.
Growing up, I didn’t read much poetry—it wasn’t part of my public school education or my particular immigrant household. I began exploring poetry after my first MFA program, which was in nonfiction, because people in my workshops kept complaining that what I was writing wasn’t essay. Finding my way in the poetry community has of course shaped the evolvement of my writing, but I still believe that more or less I am writing in the same vein.
MS: MOON has been talked about in the tradition of Fanny Howe’s poetics of bewilderment. (I’m thinking of Jennifer Tseng’s quote about the book specifically.) Is this a tradition you see yourself working in conversation with? When you approach writing, is it through a (or various) lens(es)? In what ways, or to what extent, do poetic and literary traditions inform your projects?
JSC: Actually, while in the midst of revising MOON, my thesis advisor recommended Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment.” It was one of those rare electric moments of recognition and kinship: We are after the same thing! We are moving through the world in similar modes and quandaries! In my art practice, I usually begin by following something intuitive and primal, and then later I might be able to describe it, reflecting on my process and poetics and how it converses with other literary traditions. A porous interweaving happens, I’m sure, as my process is clarified, challenged, and expanded by these quiet conversations.
MS: I’m interested in structure—within single linear narratives, but also the structure of collections, individual pieces, and the process of structuring a hybrid text like MOON. The book ranges five sections, plus a prelude and interlude. Those sections then cover a variety of forms including lists, poems, and prose blocks. How do you think about the structure of MOON now, and how did that take shape while writing it?
JSC: I probably tend to write in series because I tend to write in obsessions: I am orbiting an unsayable center, or I am attempting to say it again from another angle, or it itches at me until it stops itching (or until I am tired). The larger sections that make up the book are themselves another series that functions similarly. When I am done obsessing, or when the obsession begins to take a new turn, I know I am done writing and begin bringing the various parts together, ordering and reordering, cutting and adding, rewriting and reshaping. With MOON, I was interested in a (loose) narrative progression, a slow accumulation through its various pieces and parts.
You mention the variety of forms—lists, poems, prose blocks. I’m compelled by the notion of artifacts and collections, how a kind of narrative can emerge from a juxtaposition of small or partial pieces, how the movement is somewhat circular or at least nonlinear. MOON is interested in debris, in what is left over, in the potency of what is held in the smallest motions of our existence.
MS: MOON navigates scope beautifully, interweaving mythological figures and tales—a kind of cosmic cultural public property—alongside the deeply personal, particular or mundane. Yet, MOON seems less concerned with occupying multiple genres, whether internally in content and style or externally in form, and more concerned with movement, change, dynamic transformation. How do you think about liminality versus becoming in the book, or such terms in relation to hybrid writing? Was hybridity a particular choice or imposition on this book, or fundamentally necessary to its telling?
JSC: Ah, always what is necessary to the book! I’m not sure I understand the point of writing if I am not searching out the form it wants to inhabit. The articulations you make here are so beautiful and sharp... The book is preoccupied, in its inquiry and narrative, with movement, change, dynamic transformation, and one of the Chinese myths is even about shape-shifting women. It felt one in the same, addressing the book’s poetics and artistic process; they are bound up in the matter of the book.
I find myself lingering over your word becoming. This seems exactly right; a book is not, for me, something inert and fixed that I impose onto, but rather its coming into being is organic and mixed up with my own. I am a new mother, so forgive the metaphor, but maybe a book is something that gestates and transforms within and alongside myself.
MS: Who are one or two other writers working in hybrid forms who don’t get enough attention?
JSC: Heidi Van Horn is a friend of mine who, like me, is extremely introverted and quiet about her writing. The micro-press of which I am a part recently published her first book, Belated, a lyrical sequence of photographs and text. Another friend, Christina Tran works mainly in what I would call graphic essays, and I am in awe of the way she merges her artistic and poetic sensibilities with an ability to make keen connections across various fields and spheres of observation.
MS: What are you working on, or interested in, at the moment?
JSC: I am interested in the unexamined space where poetry and motherhood blur.
**This interview was edited slightly for clarity and context.
Mackenzie Suess is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Sundog Lit, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded grants and fellowships to write, teach, and present her work globally, and currently teaches writing workshops at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Issue 10.2