Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence & Grief w/ VICTORIA CHANG

“What do you do now that your parents are both gone? And what’s left, and what are you supposed to do with the rest of your life? And I think that whole book was an exploration of those ideas and thinking through that. I think a lot of my books and works are me sort of thinking through things that I’m experiencing, and I think I came out of that book thinking, “Oh yeah, I’m supposed to live.” And I had to remind myself after they died, like, who am I without them? You know, I’m walking on this earth, I’m maybe walking an inch above the earth now, and I think it’s because all of that burden and history had evaporated."

When the poet Victoria Chang’s father had a stroke and lost his language and shortly thereafter her mother passed away, she realized the history of her immigrant parents was disappearing into silence. Since then, her work, including the acclaimed collection Obit and her collage memoir, Dear Memory, has been an attempt to fill those generational gaps through art. In our interview today, we’ll focus on how she uses the natural world and the visions of artists like Hilma af Klint to map the invisible landscapes of grief in her latest book, Tree of Knowledge. We’ll also talk about the felling of a eucalyptus tree outside her window, how she learned to read silences, and how poetry has helped her speak with the ancestors she never truly knew.

(0:00) The Language of Silence

(4:56) Reading - Dear Memory

(9:32) The Mystery of Poetry

(30:43) Releasing the Burden of History

(34:00) Identity and Agency 38:16 The Immigrant Experience

(48:30) Misogyny and the Visual Arts

(54:11) Grief and Shared Existence

(1:05:31) Radical Attentiveness

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

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