Good Life Project - Ocean Vuong | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

A refugee at the age of two, Ocean Vuong and his mom found themselves fleeing Saigon, Vietnam, traveling across the globe, then dropped into a world that was simultaneously a source of renewal and safety, while also delivering a daily dose of profound othering. The English language came slowly to Ocean, struggling to read at the age of 11. But, over time, his deep curiosity and sense of observation led to a love of language that grabbed hold and never let go. In 2016, he released a critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky that dazzled the literary world. His gorgeously written and deeply stirring first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (https://amzn.to/3htad7j), which became an instant New York Times bestseller, draws largely on his experience growing up in Hartford, Connecticut with a mom who shared a complex love in a community he seemed perpetually estranged from. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Ocean is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. You can find Ocean at:Website : https://www.oceanvuong.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/ocean_vuong/If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Axel Mansoor about the experience of being a third culture kid and how he found an outlet in music : https://pod.link/goodlifeproject/episode/3bd82ee46ef2d24985dfd3f9d7ffa52f-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So a refugee at the age of two, Ocean Vuong and his mom found themselves fleeing Saigon, Vietnam, traveling across the globe, and then dropped into a world that was simultaneously a source of renewal and safety, while also delivering a daily dose of profound othering and challenge. The English language came slowly to Ocean, struggling to read at the age of 11. But over time, his deep curiosity and sense of observation and openness led to a love of language that grabbed hold and just never let go. In 2016, he released a critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky, that dazzled the literary world. His gorgeously written and deeply stirring first novel,

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. It draws on his experience growing up in Hartford, Connecticut with a mom who shared a complex love in a community he seemed perpetually estranged from. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Genius Grant, Ocean is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the TSLA Prize. His writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times, and so many others. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. We're in this really interesting moment in time, I think. And I would imagine the past handful of years have been strange and transformative in a lot of ways for you. But let's take a little bit of a step back in time because a lot of the seeds of your story really don't just start in Hartford, Connecticut in the US. It really starts in Vietnam in, I guess, the late 80s, early 90s

when the family fled as so many did and found themselves refugees effectively in Connecticut, you coming up really just knowing your mom largely and her touching down in a place that probably when she was a child, the notion of her trying to find a life in Hartford, Connecticut in the United States was the most bizarre and foreign thing that she could ever have imagined. Yeah. Yeah. It was disorienting. I think war displaces and I think PTSD is a displacement you know it's it's basically the experience of trauma taking over the present and so I always say that to remember is a very costly thing for for anyone whether it's a national memory or a personal one because you literally risk the present. You forsake the present in order to go back. And so the cost of remembering is your very life. And so the women who raised me who suffer from

PTSD, they had no choice. Their memory often hijacked their present. And so it was a flickering, you know, living with them and being nurtured by them was, you know, this almost hyper flickering time capsule. It was like traveling through time through TV channels. And, you know, so there's that internal disorientation, but also Hartford, America was so different. And it's not only America, but cities. My family came from rice farmers. And if it wasn't for the war, we would still be rice farmers. We've been farming that land for centuries.

And so it was a lot to learn, but it was also very freeing because they did not have any framework to pressure me to be a careerist in any way, to be a doctor or a business person or, you know, the stereotypical Asian American plight of young people. They were just like, it was all a blank slate. It's like, do whatever you can, you know, work at McDonald's, it's a job. And so I had on one hand, the disorientation created this absolute freedom to explore whatever I wanted. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating, because, you know, I think people very often, they make different choices, and there are different motivations for leaving one country and making a life in another country. And sometimes it's a blend of running from and running to,

wanting something and at the same time wanting to leave something. And in the case of your family and so many others, at least in the immediate choice, it was a running from. It was a, effectively, we need to stay alive. And then, you know, so I think very often in circumstances like that, it's less about sort of this intentional choice of how do we pick among the different places where it would give us the best opportunity? It was just like, no, how do we stay alive right now? And then you land in another place and then all the other things start to unfold. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why I insist on the word refugee and not even former refugee, right?

Because I think our understanding of the word refugee is colored by the newsreel, where a woman or a parent running and dragging their children in the midst of this highly chaotic instant. It's this highly chaotic instant. It's always about the instant. And the scream of the refugee captured in the photograph is almost like Edward Munch's scream. It's like this frozen moment. But in fact, it's prolonged.

One is a refugee forever. And I think that is really vital in understanding history that's often outside of that frame of that photograph. Because we did have to ask, well, why? What is the epicenter of the refugee? And I always insist that my American citizenship did not begin when I arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, the Laurel, New England world of Wallace Stevens and Mark Twain. But it began with American foreign policy when the first bombs fell in Vietnam, a country no larger than California. My American citizenship began there. with that runs many levels, but on the surface of it is, is there a moment, do you wonder, or is there a generation where the transition becomes made from refugee to resident? Or do

you feel like it is a perpetual, it's almost like it's in the DNA and that is just the way it endures? Well, it's important to expand refugee too, right? I think my quick answer would be there's no end to it and there shouldn't be, right? Because we often ask of an American identity, well, when are you fully American? It is when do you move beyond the epicenter? And I think moving beyond epicenter is how we get into the trouble that we get into in this country. We want to forget that this nation is founded on genocide and literally enslaving people for labor, for free labor. And so I think for me, I'm more interested in, well, how else are we refugees even beyond the crisis? I turn to the Jewish diaspora and the Holocaust. So many

studies and researchers coming from that, they were the researchers that came out of the Holocaust, but the first to really have the foundation epigenetic trauma in talking about when are we okay? And is it okay to not be okay, even if the epicenter is no longer within reach, no longer within felt memory? You know, we understand this through the conversation of reparations in Black communities, right? So that we see that these epicenters, in some sense, never lose their grip on us, regardless of who we are. It just takes over like vines of the country. And so I'm more interested in redefining and expanding what a refugee is so that we don't have this sort of, okay, now that we're done with it, who are we? I think who we are depends on what we've reckoned

with, with our history. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. You know, it's interesting also because when, you know, you now in, I believe your 30s, have a certain lens on this, whereas when you're coming up as a kid, you know, very often that you wake up in the morning, you go out, you know, you're in your single digits, your teens, and all you want to do is be okay and to a certain becomes an obsession with self-worth. And I think, in a sense, we all have this. The tribulations of childhood is so fraught because we don't really have all the tools. We have facts. The textbook gives us facts in which often we don't know what to do

with. But I wish education, you know, primary school education taught us how to question and allowed us how to be more than just one or two things. But growing up in New England, you know, on the other hand, allowed me to really understand America. New England is a very crowded place. Everything's close together. You drive 20 minutes and you literally slice through everything about America, social, political, race, gender, economics, class differences. And so I got what is, in retrospect, a crash course in what America is. And I'm

ultimately really grateful for that education, even though it might not have been intended for me in that way. Yeah. I mean, especially in Hartford, Connecticut, where you literally, you can go a couple of blocks in any direction or five minutes in any direction if you're in a car and go from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods to neighborhoods that really are steeped in poverty side by side, which like you said, in almost any major city or any metropolitan or large enough town, you're going to find that. But especially in the Northeast, having grown up in the Northeast as well, I have seen and experienced that as well. Seeing your mom also and being raised effectively by a single mom who never read, never spoke English, it's interesting. I've seen the experience of kids raised in that situation where

sometimes they become the nurturers, the ones who rally the protectors. And then sometimes it's the exact opposite sentiment. It's almost like a complete dissociation with that because it is the source of the thing that makes you feel different and in that feel othered. I'm wondering how you danced with that. Yeah, you grow up very quickly and I don't know how it would be different. You know, you grow up and you think, well, I wish I had a parent that could take me to basketball games. You know, instead, I didn't even know when the signups were, right? Because my mother never had an email address, you know. And so you end up becoming protectors of them because you have the access of the English language, right? The English language makes people legible. And they weren't

legible because they couldn't speak. And they were always in the background of the country, whether it's a store, on the street, in the DMV, and I would have to step up and speak for them. And it's a fraught thing because you don't want to speak for anybody. You know, you don't want to speak for these adults who brought you into the world. That's not a decision any child or any person really wants to do. You realize that you have to in order for them to be valued. And in a way, I'm still doing this in a sense, right? Only on a larger scale. Our culture is obsessed with using media and narrative to increase value on a certain group of people when those groups of people should already be valued from the get-go, right? We're often asked

to narrate often suffering in order for value to be placed on a group of people. And I'm trying to participate in a way that resists that. I'm curious what's underneath that. I wonder if there are these multiple levels of, you know, on the level of society, there are reasons, but also on the level of self-preservation and the way that you want to exert your energy moving through the world. Yeah, yeah. You know, you see it, for example, the 19 England was colonizing the global South. You see this movement with liberal progressive artists, you know, Flaubert going to Egypt and returning and saying, we shouldn't colonize and conquer these people because they have art, right? And so, meanwhile, he should have said, we shouldn't conquer them because they're people.

Because they have heartbeats, not art. Yeah, yeah. So this humanist, this once very progressive humanist movement was an attempt to kind of validate life through culture, and often consumable culture. And so then we pillage all of the art and then put it in European museums. And I think this is still happening, sadly, over a hundred years later. There's this demand amongst the liberal, progressive white milieu of asking artists of color

to sort of humanize themselves in order for a predominantly white audience to have empathy. And it's a double bind because then you're kind of limited to constantly narrating your worth when you should be worthy from the get-go. And it's a difficult place to work in, and I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. I go back to James Baldwin, where he says, you know, when he considers whiteness in America, he says, I don't know white people personally, but I know them historically. And in that sense, you know, there's such a wealth.

History is much longer than the brief few years that we get to share on earth as living people. And I think in that sense, when I consider my role as an artist in America, I have to kind of consider how whiteness has seen itself as purveyors of art, you know, way beyond this country, all the way back to Europe, you know, hundreds of years ago. Yeah, I mean, there's the role of the arbiter of what has value. And I think it becomes even more fraught when you have the overlay of, can I sustain myself by doing this thing? I feel compelled for no other reason than the way it makes me feel. And it's the thing I can't not do. But the notion of then being able to not only have it accepted and have it be a valid expression of who you are but go beyond

that and in some way interact with other people with enough other people in a way where they see enough quote value in it themselves that they're willing to support your work just you know it brings this whole additional layer to it, which I know for every artist, whether it's painting, art, music, has been this perpetually fraught dynamic. It's a prayer in the dark. And you don't know if anyone's listening. And I do think that at its core, at its most vital, lonely, heart-wrenching endeavor, writing, staying up late, staring out the dark window, and asking of the page to articulate something of value. It's like prayer. It's the same thing as when we are in crises. We kneel down at the bed and ask of whoever that we believe is in power to help us. But I think the beauty of this

is that writing is ultimately an optimistic act. If I didn't have hope, if I didn't feel positively indebted to our species' constant improvement, I wouldn't sit down to write. In the same way, someone wouldn't pray without hope. They pray because they want to live and they want to live better. And in the same way, I write because I think their improvement is just ahead of me, even if it means just the improvement of a sentence, which as any writer would tell you, you yourself would know that's a win for a day if you can write a good sentence. There are times where I sit down and I read other sentences.

And I think to myself, in five years, I may be able to write a sentence that may be remotely worthy of that one sentence. And oddly, like you just shared, I'm okay with that. Because to me, there's an aspirational element to it. And there's a sense of possibility that there will be growth, there will be progress and a certain amount of even beyond hope, faith. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you couldn't be pessimistic as an artist. It's just so, and I don't even think most people at their core are pessimistic. I've been reading Thomas Merton recently, or I read him all the time, but I go back.

And his engagement with Buddhism is so thorough and earnest and aspirational. And I think the way his mind works, the way he sees the world as a means of illumination is so, so inspiring to me. If you look at our daily life, everything is infused with goodness, so much more than we actually think. I mean, just look at a chair. The chair is so well considered of the human form. The person making the chair, even if they're having a horrible day, they still succeeded in infusing that chair with the goodness of the intention of making a serviceable thing for people. They made sure it's the sturdiest. It does this. It rotates.

And you can see this with almost everything you look at. and the intention of our species really outweigh the horrors, even though the horrors predominate what we see on the news, because they're controlled by so few, but they affect so many. And that's the big dynamic that we, I think, should focus on at the end of the day, whether it's in novels or media or podcasting, is power. It all comes down to power. Yeah. It's interesting that you reference sort of like a Buddhist sensibility in Merton's writings, which I see that very same thing,

which is, and I know Buddhist studies or Buddhist ideas, ideals, texts, is something that you were drawn to fairly early as well. I think in high school is when it started to become something that really sort of infused your thinking.

Yeah, I think, I don't know. You know, maybe I'll be a, I would be a Buddhist if I think in high school is when it started to become something that really sort of infused your thinking. Yeah, I think, I don't know, you know, maybe I'll be, I would be a Buddhist if I was in, you know, Kathmandu or, but I think for something about growing up in New England, pushed me there even further because I just saw so much wealth and privilege. I saw what we now understand as white male privilege. I saw it so close, right? They were my peers, and I saw them at their most vulnerable, which is their coming to manhood. And I still, despite of all the structural privilege, I still saw that joy and happiness was still so rare, even amongst them. And I think Buddhism begins right there, right? Suffering is the law of the land. And the question then is, how do we transform it into something useful? And I just went to the library and I just thought, I got to find a way out of here. And it wasn't about moving geographically. It was about finding a way out of the soul of America

that was so corrupt that it was turning boys into, you know, the most reductive holograms of who they could be. and they were suffering from it. And I got to see it so up close. And that was, I think, the great privilege of examining white male privilege was that underneath all of the facade of power and the structural gifts that this country offers it, happiness was still so rare and fraught and at times inconceivable. And so it did not have the same power that it does on paper that I saw in life. And so I didn't want it. I didn't see that that was the pinnacle of this country. Then we're in trouble. It's not something, it's not a

destination that I wanted to go to. So I had to find something else. Yeah. I mean, realizing that at an early age, and not that the depth of your awakenings, I would imagine, I won't make assumptions, but the lens that you just shared, I would imagine is something that has unfolded over a period of years. You start into the world of Buddhist ideas and really a lot of different types of Eastern thought. And I think it plants seeds that very often take years to blossom into saplings. And then eventually larger plants of thought that make coherent blossoms and flowers. But when you're starting to dabble in these ideas and starting to bring them into your life and becoming aware of the world around you and having different tools really to understand and

process them, at the same time, it's interesting to me that as you move out of being a kid and decide, okay, so what is my next place? That there was something inside of you that even for a heartbeat said, well, there's this voice that says, follow a more traditional path, go to business school, do the thing that's going to be sustainable and secure and safe and supportive. And the narrative for you is that was this relatively short experiment and impulse and intuition shortly took over. But I'm wondering about that short moment, those four or five weeks where you decide, I'm going to give, a month. And like any immigrant first-generation kid to go to college, I thought, where do I make money so that my mother and my family can thrive, so that I could be an artist? I always wanted to be an artist. I didn't know how. And I just thought I owe it to them to take care of them first.

And I tried. I couldn't do it. You know, I was in these classes and my peers would come in with suits and they would go off to internships at Morgan Chase and JP Morgan and Chase Bank and all that. And I just thought, I don't know how I can do this. I'm learning to just lie. I was an international marketing student and it was basically lying for companies. That was my future. And I thought, if I'm going to lie, I might as well lie in my own work, lie as an artist, which is the greatest pleasure. And it was ultimately an act of failure.

I failed the American dream, quote unquote. And so I thought me studying literature was just a way of salvaging the failure. And at least coming home and giving my mother a degree in which she couldn't read. I could have told her it was chemical science, bioengineering. It wouldn't matter. So I got a degree in literature at Brooklyn College. And that was kind of me surrendering. That was me saying, okay, I guess I'm going to be a bum. I mean, I'm not going to, I'm going to work at Starbucks and go back to Panera and read books at the library. And it was a kind of a resignation. But because there was no other

prospects, I threw myself at literature. I just said, this is it. Let's go 110%. And then one thing led to another, and here I am. So it's absolutely disorienting. No one really wants writers. We're not a country that says, go and be a writer. And so I can't really complain that I chose this path and how hard it is. It's hard, but it's not the hardest. But I chose it. I want it to be. And I think ultimately, again, it is an act of optimism. It's an aspirational act, an act of prayer that I hope I can manifest something. Taking your intention into your own hands and manifesting a book out of that, you naturally gain a lot of wisdom just with that.

Just because you cared about something so small. You know, a book is about 60,000, 80,000 words. And to care about 80,000 tiny things, not to mention the commas and punctuation involved, it changes you. You can come out at the end of that endeavor. There's very few things on this earth that trains the mind to care about so many minuscule things, but with absolute intention and consideration, that it naturally changes you. It's an act of meditation in itself. Yeah, that completely resonates with me, having been through the process a number of times myself as well. It brings everything up. And I almost wonder, if that process doesn't change you, then why are you even saying yes to it?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an act of utmost humbling, you know, because to be an apprentice of the sentence, which I believe every writer should be, is to be an apprentice of failure. So, you know, by the time any writer publishes anything, they probably failed on a daily level more than most folks. And so I think being okay with failure brings you closer to the human condition. It's very anti-social in the sense because we like to celebrate triumphs. We don't like to talk about depression and insecurities and loneliness and our failures at the dinner table. Not at the dinner table. Not now, we always say. We stave off the dark until it only permits one person, us, and then we start to toil away. And I think the pandemic has really amplified American loneliness, especially around men, particularly men in their 30s. There's an

epidemic now of mental health and suicide rates among men in their 30s because we've didn't equip our men to reach out well enough. You know, there's all this homophobia around men asking each other out for drinks. Like, oh, what are you trying to do? You know? And then they just toil away and we're seeing the ramifications of it. And I'm veering off here,

but I think the act of writing anything is giving more versions of yourself to one thing. And it really teaches you, at least teaches me, how to live. That if I could give more versions of myself to a text, then I should also try or aspire to give more versions of myself to my loved ones and my community, etc. Yeah. etc yeah whether you're in your running era pilates era or yoga era dive into peloton workouts that work with you from meditating at your kids game to mastering a strength program they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals no pressure to be who you're not just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are so no matter your era make it your

best with peloton find your push find your power peloton visit peloton at onepeloton.ca mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what's the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk the apple watch series 10 is here it has the biggest display ever it's also the thinnest apple watch ever making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running swimming or sleeping and it's the fastest charging apple watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results

will vary. There is a poem from Night Sky, which I guess was 2016, right? Entitled Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong, where you write, Ocean, ocean, get up. The most beautiful part of your body is where it's headed. And remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world, which I think really speaks to what you were just sharing. Yes, yes. Because, you know, I think the world is infused, again, with a certain

intelligence. Everything we see, the plants, the trees, I don't mean to sound new agey, but I think the more I grow older, the more I quote unquote accomplish, and the more I fail, the more I'm confident in this sort of strange binary. Binaries are not very cool nowadays. They're not trendy. But the more I live, the more I see that, you know what? Star Wars had it right. It is good and evil, right? But the world is not complex, I don't think. This might be very controversial, I don't know. But I think human beings are complex. The world is not complex.

We look at it, it manifests either in goodness or in the Death Star. There's just two, it's kind of very, in a way, it's very black and white, but it's us, right? And I think this is something that's very important because we have to take more agency in our actions, that the filter of the human filters a manifestation that is useful and good and one that is harmful. Words are like that. We saw this in the Trump administration, how words can harm. We still see the ramification with this China virus and the Asian hate crimes spreading across, right? And so the manifestation, I think,

are often clear, but the ambivalence, the contradictions and the paradoxes is within us. And the more agency we take, the more responsibility we take in that, the more goodness we can filter through the vessel of the person. And the older I get, I mean, years ago, I would say this is, you know, the world is complex, everything is open and anything is possible. But the more I look at it, the more I see that when it lands in the earth, when it lands in the world, when it manifests, it is very clear which side it's on. And it looks very, very much like Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's an interesting concept to make this separation. The world itself is fairly straightforward, but it is what we bring to it through our internal processing and lenses and filtering that makes it so much more complex.

Yeah. And it kind of puts into question, what is a good person and what's a bad person? It throws that all out the window because there are only acts, right? That's why, you know, sometimes you see on the trial of a serial killer, they interview the parent. They say, he was so perfect. He was my baby, you know? And it's like, these complexities are inside us and the acts are clear. The acts land on either side, but the people are complex. And the more we invest in the thinking of our complexity, the more we can nurture goodness. And maybe this is too naive.

Maybe in another 10 years, I would laugh at myself. But right now, you know, this is what I feel. No, that actually resonates deeply. I remember reviewing some researches from the world of social science, positive psychology, and they were speaking to phenomenon where when we see somebody else do something we perceive as a quote, bad act, we view that as an identity level action. Well, they are, we label that person, oh, that's a bad person. When we do something that would be on a similar level, a quote, bad act, well, it was just a bad decision. We're good people who made a bad choice or took a bad action in the world. So there is this human phenomenon that tends to associate the bad acts of others on an identity level basis. Yet the very same behavior from us is just an aberration,

but we are fundamentally on an identity level. We see ourselves as good. It's a strange quirk of human nature. What you're describing, Jonathan, right there is storytelling, right? Because you said there's two objective observations. One has a different narrative than the other. One is that's an evil person. The other one is, oh, I'm a good person who made a mistake or was forced to make a bad decision. And that is storytelling. And this is why storytelling is so important. It's not just novels. Entire nations are built on the myths of storytelling. And this is why I'm really, I'm so excited to be a writer. Because at the end of the day, our entire species depends on how we transform observation, transform phenomena, and infuse it and transform it using words to land one way or another.

And everything begins with it. You know, you can have all the technology in the world, all the medicine, all the weaponry, the nuclear, you world, all the medicine, all the weaponry, the nuclear weapons. It could be the most advanced arsenal, but you can never deploy it without a story. And it's no accident that the majority of the presidents and the people who lead this country and the people who lead CEO positions in businesses come from a liberal arts background, from a law background. They're ultimately storytelling. It takes the story to harness the resources, either for good or for destruction, but it begins with the story,

right? We think of the Odyssey, the story of the woman stolen, right? And we must launch a thousand ships to reclaim her. The mythos of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never came through, right? The mythos that Washington was this noble man with wooden teeth who saved this country, but ignoring his slaves, right? And so myth is what we make and also what we take out. And it transforms how we see the world. And we are a species that has this tool. And that's such a valuable thing, the more we pay attention to it. But I think our education hides that. We are told that we need to learn a standardized English in order to write a good email and get a job. And pretty much that's it, right? Learn the

rules and carry on. But what we should be telling our children is that this is your inheritance. We're leaving you this wealth that can change the future. It's called language. Look at it as a plastic, malleable world. How you determine what you want to be, where you want to live in this world depends on what you say to each other. Imagine if we taught them that rather than just, you know, here's a comma splice, you know, don't start your sentence with because, you know, I mean, imagine, you know, and you don't, I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it's very clear, at least with my education, that language was just this thing that I had to catch up with. And if I didn't, then I was shamefully subpar in it, but it was not something that I possessed. And I think if

we taught students that they truly possess this and that their value of life, their quality of life will be determined by how they use this material, it would be so, so incredible. I so agree with that on every level. And I feel like it is language, especially the art of story is sort of like the bastard child of education in no small extent. These days, we've become so obsessed with the quantifiable, with numbers and code and systems and process. And these things matter. The scientific process matters. Evidence-based things matter. And yet at the same time, if all of those things exist and yet we lose the capacity to tell and understand and share and relate to one another through story, how much does all the rest really matter? And yet it's the thing that none of us were really taught effectively, unless you went out and deliberately sought to learn that. It's not sort of a part of the core curriculum of the way that we're taught.

The fundamental skill set, not just the fundamental skill set, but the fundamental lens of looking to see clearly so you can understand what the source fuel for the stories are. Yep, exactly. It's the classic Greek dichot stories are. Yep, exactly. It's the classic Greek dichotomy between pathos and logos. And it's not even that logos is better or where we should lie and that pathos is manipulative. It's just, it is what it is.

But it so happens that pathos often wins, right? Every dictatorship, every, you know, movement either, you know, for liberating our people or to condemn and enslave our people as a species begins and ends with pathos. It's harnessing an emotional response in order to transform the phenomenal reality. And I think, you know, knowing that is not so much a good or bad thing, but in fact, it might even be a good thing in that we are a species that respond with compassion. And it's just often propaganda tools

manipulate our compassions to get us to ultimately destroy each other. And so, but at the end of the day, we seek a certain goodness. We just don't know how to translate that. And so I think at the core, there is something very promising here, but we're just not exactly there yet. So great. The fact of a moment is always limited by the story of its happening. Yeah, yeah. And yet we focus so much on articulating the fact without actually articulating the story that makes it real for so many people. The story allows us to zoom in.

And I think for whatever reason, we as a species respond very viscerally, very potently when we zoom in. And maybe it's because we come out of tribal backgrounds where, you know, the person who's most hurt is the center. And we collectively tend to that person when they're ill and they're hurt. And then so their story suddenly becomes the story of the tribe for that era, for that community, for that moment, and until they are healed, right? So we're a problem-solving species built on empathy. And that gives me a lot of hope. I think it's been manipulated. I think that knowledge in the hands of corporations and military- complexes has really harmed us. But to know that that is who we are, in a sense, gives me a lot of hope. You know, there's this fact, and I don't know

if it's absolutely true. I know it's debated, but I keep thinking about this fact about, you know, the trigger rate of American soldiers in World War II. It was determined that it was about 25%, 20-25%. And so only a quarter of American soldiers fired their guns. And that's, you know, if anything, that was, it proves that we are not built for war. We were not meant to aim a machine of death at another person. And the American military kind of understood this. And so when the Vietnam War came, the firing rate went up to 90%. Wow.

So the question is, how? And the answer is storytelling. So for the first time, the military training from basic training forward with draftees was infused with dehumanizing words and elements, right? Now we start to hear words like gook, right? You know, chink, Charlie, and then the American foreign policy of measuring success at one point, right? McNamara says, we will now measure the success of this war through the actual bodies on the ground, the actual corpses, regardless of whether they're enemy combatants or not. And so basically, the military understood that to have a better machine of death, you must use storytelling, words,

to transform a human being into something lesser than that. So at the end of the day, the soldiers did not feel that they were killing people, but they were hunting something less than, which made the triggers much more easier to pull. In the same way, it's much more easier to hunt a deer than to shoot a person. And that was through the power of language. So when you think about language as something corralled or relegated to the dusty halls of the liberal arts college, you know, composed of the stem, you're gravely mistaken because it is actually an incredible technology, perhaps the most advanced technology we have. Yeah. I'm just, every part of me is nodding in agreement with you. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work

with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You know, it's fascinating also in the context of your novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,

when a lot of the stories that you've been talking about here and a lot of the frames that we talk about when we're sharing stories is there is a quote us and then there's a them. There is a victim and there's a villain or an entire class or category or culture that is one or the other. And the stories are, I've heard it said in the film writing world, that stories are about conflict resolution.

There's gotta be conflict. There's gotta be the good. There's gotta be the bad. There has to be the victim and the villain. And the story lies in the conflict and the resolution or the non-resolution. And I'm fascinated because in your novel, which is effectively written as a letter, the character is writing to the mother, but effectively it's also, there's so much of your life in here writing to your mom, knowing that in fact, the mother will

never be able to read it. That within this whole beautiful story as it's unfolding, that it is, there are no clear victims or villains. It's less about conflict. It's less about who wins, who loses, who's right, who's wrong. And it's more about what you were talking about before. It's like, how can I tell this in a way that creates the space for all, that focuses in, that really zooms and lands in and holds it all without necessarily creating that tension, that conflict, and still have a powerful story, which is astonishingly difficult to do, but so beautifully done in this work. Thank you for saying that. I think it's just a different way of viewing what a story should do. And the Freytag's inverted arc example of climax,

anticlimax, resolution's a traditional one. It comes from the Greeks and the Romans. And that's the pillars of Western thinking is high drama and resolution. And we see that a lot. And it's not nothing wrong with it. I just, for me, I just felt, or I believed that life is already conflicted, that history is a conflicted background, it's conflicted soil, so that whatever grows out of that soil comes out of a very fraught, dangerous, complicated,

and ultimately a climatic foundation so to then take characters out of that and throw them into an orchestrated tightly wound plot was to kind of in a way ignore how interesting their histories are and so I always felt that people are already conflicted in life. And a story can be interesting just by allowing people to be near each other. Proximity creates friction, just like chemicals. Hydrogen, oxygen, put it together, water. Transformation happens when potent energies stand beside each other. So in a way, I just kind of created space

for these characters to live in. I put them in. I insist that it is fiction because every scene in the book came out of my head. It's not mimetic of my life. The context is mimetic of my life. I'm interested in the autobiographical project because it's an American project. From Salinger to Sylvia Plath to Moby Dick to Walt Whitman, the American self amplified in literature is kind of the legacy of American writing. And I wanted to participate in that. It also raises the stakes. I had to render these people well because they were built from the foundation of the people I know. So I owe it to them to be ethical in how I portrayed them. And I liked that challenge. It made their histories more thorough.

And you're right in that I never wanted a villain or a victor in this book, but simply people. And you can see it more as a portrait gallery rather it is when you take a book like this and the publishing industry, which is notoriously in love with the formula, they want to know how is this like something that has succeeded before, before they say yes. up with a tremendous surge of energy and momentum around you in the literary world and a fantastic book of poetry before this. But then when you show up with this novel, which is structurally very different, and then the publishers say, okay, so we'll do this. Let's do this. And they bring it out to the world. The fact that it has been received so astonishingly well, and in fact, now is in the process of being made into a movie. I think it also, there's a bigger statement there in that the assumptions that we made about how we need to create this darkness and light and this very prototypical art, and that's the only thing that people want, that is not true.

That's spot on. And I think it undercuts the intelligence of readers of all walks of life in the country and across the world to say that the justification that's never been done before and therefore shouldn't be done is incredibly silly and fraught and infused by capitalism, right? There's this fear that we lose money and it hurts art. And, you know, it wasn't without its, the publishing of this book, it's not without its struggles. I was very lucky to have the chance to meet publishers and to talk to them and see which one I wanted to work with. And I ultimately went with Anne Goddard, my editor, who's a legendary, brilliant genius. She understood this book through and through. She's published Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Mary Oliver. So I just, it was just like meeting an old friend.

And, you know, we were already talking about how this book would live in the world. Whereas in other meetings, you know, I've had publishers say, you have a book about five topics, pick one, right? You have three endings, pick one. You know, one even said, what would this book feel like

for a Midwestern reader? And I say, well, what would it feel like for any reader? What is a Midwestern reader, by the way? You know, I mean, it's so condescending in a sense. And this is part of the problem of publishing being polarized

in New York and the West part of the problem of publishing being polarized in the you know in new york and and in the west coast where it actually characterizes american populations towards cartoonish versions that have no semblance of the actual ground the actual reality and and i think i'm still despite all that quite surprised that this book has done what it's done. I don't know why. My heroes were esoteric, hybrid, weird, barely read poets. You know, Basho, you know, Teresa Hak-yong Cha, Marguerite Dura, you know, strange writers, Barry Hanna, uh, you know, that, and so I don't know why I didn't have bestsellers as my role model.

Um, so I'm a little bit perplexed still, but I think it's proof that people are, they know that they live conflicted lives, that they know that their lives are not put in the wood chipper of plot. And so for a book to kind of reflect the honesty in living in the mundane, eating meals together and having difficult conversations with loved ones, that's American life from the very beginning to right now and probably long after. I know part of the through line as you're writing this book is that you're moving through the creation process, the creative process, the storytelling and publishing process, and also standing increasingly in your seat or taking your seat as a teacher. And a lot of what you were just sharing, to me, it was the voice of a teacher. It's an invocation and an evocation to think deeper and to think more broadly and more

inclusively and expansively. And that role for you has been formalized. You know, you're now at UMass teaching in the writing program there. When you say yes to that, when you say yes to, okay, so I am a writer and this is what breathes me to no small extent. And I'm also saying yes to say, I'm going to play the role of a mentor, a teacher, to people who are just stepping into this themselves. When you think about what that is really about to you and what you hold sacred as you step into that role, I'm curious what comes to your mind. Yeah, yeah. I don't see a major difference between the two.

One is very, very private, of course. Writing is very private and teaching is very public. And so I don't... The only difference is that you have to be willing to give your students everything. And that's not hold back any secret knowledge. And the willingness to open up the coffers and empty the safes, to have no safes, to say, I'm going to give you everything I know, and you take it and you do what you can. Essentially, that is my pedagogy.

And what I know changes, what I know grows based on how I live and what I understand. And so it's simple, but it's very hard work, you know, because you really have to teach them, guide them, but also root for them. And so it's an emotional process. And, you know, especially rooting for them in a day and age where being a writer is very challenging. You know, why do this thing? We're taught that you should do something more useful, right? And of course, I tell them what I told you is that you're talking about the most useful advanced technology we have. You're choosing this endeavor.

But I always feel like thinking about your work is actually the majority of the work. You know, it's kind of like the beauty of a podcast like this, where you get to kind of develop a soil. What I mean by that is that the book is one flower that comes out of a soil. It's limited. It's finite.

But when you have a conversation like we're having now, when you think about your work and your pedagogy and your philosophy, your ethics, you're nurturing the soil. So the soil then becomes inexhaustible. Any book can come out of that soil if we tend to it. I live in New England and I'm lucky to know a few queer farmers and they always tell me how important it is to reinvest in the soil, to re-nourish the soil, to bring the soil back. And so theory and ethics and philosophy is the soil in which all things come out of. And if I didn't have that, if I didn't have the ability to articulate the soil, I think ultimately that's what teaching is. It's explaining and articulating the soil so that it doesn't look just like a dark mass. It's cutting the stratification, lifting it up and seeing it through and saying, this is where the sediment is. This is what these nutrients are. And this is where the roots go. The ability

to do that is so important. And I think if I was any other writer, if I was a younger writer, you know, publishing a book of poems helped me grow and think and mature in a way. But I could see how a lot of writers could enter those meetings where a publisher says, pick one, or our Midwestern readers won't like this, and kind of cave to that and surrender to that because they don't have the soil. So in those meetings, I had to kind of do the TED Talk. I had to explain the value in my work and to convince some editors that what I'm doing is not arbitrary. This is not a lucky accident. This is intentional. This comes from deep, long investment in the soil. And what you're seeing is the blossoming that came from that. And so I could see also how a lot of writers can lose themselves in this process if they don't know where they're coming from.

If they don't know what soil they come from and they can't articulate that, they could be wiped out. Having a deep sense of that gives such a sense of fortitude in a certain way. Or it makes you understand, I think, where your line in the sand is. It's interesting because almost in a complimentary way, I know I've also heard you offer the phrase to privilege your sense of bewilderment and wonder. So it's almost like on the one hand, yes, like till the soil, know what that soil looks like be deeply familiar with it and at the same time open yourself to the vast sense of the unknown and what you know may emerge before you yes what else can i put into the soil right you know this year i learned just to extend the metaphor that

you could put coffee grounds in the soil and it it did wonders for my houseplants. I never knew that. And I reacted the same way I reacted to anything, you know, that delights and wonders and acknowledge and informs. I was like, oh, my God, coffee in my cactus. And it was so delightful to think and feel and and be open to that I think you know never sit down at the desk or anywhere deciding to do to write a love poem I actually one of my assignments my students I'm very sneaky I try to be sneaky and I say all right next week write me a love poem and I just you know right before I leave class I just drop it, next week, write me a love poem. And I just, you know, right before I leave class, I just drop it. And next week comes around and I can see their faces, right? And I say, wasn't easy, was it? And you'd be surprised how many of them, you know, just couldn't do it

because why would anyone work that way, right? To put the mantle of a huge subject onto above your head and write towards that cripples creativity. In the same way that to write only as an Asian American or a queer person, these labels also stunt and narrow the possibilities of bewilderment and wonder. I don't sit down writing as whatever label the world offers me, because often the world only offers you one or two. But I know I have more. I'm a dog lover, a fan of mixed martial arts, you know, a vegan at best, you know. And so all these things, I have all this wealth of ontological truths.

Why would I write only under one mantle? And especially what's expected of me. You lose yourself. And so I always remind them to kind of, you know, don't give yourself a clear objective. Give yourself a hopeful horizon. Move towards something, not just aimless, but move towards something, knowing that whatever you make towards that movement will still be valuable, even if you don't get there. There is no true destination. Yeah, that resonates deeply. There's an interesting corollary in the world of business, oddly enough, and entrepreneurship in that I often feel, and somebody who's been through the process of founding a number of times over, that in the early days, and it's very much like any creative endeavor, including starting to write, I've come to believe that movement is far more important

than direction, that the direction will... Sometimes you do sit down and you're compelled by a very precise thing, but I don't necessarily think that's necessary. And like you said, in certain situations, I think it's counterproductive where it's more important to simply start moving in almost any direction, to move from being static to being in motion. And it's the process of movement that reveals the direction or the eventual outcome. there with less stumbling, but the there that you land may not be anywhere close to representative of the there you could have landed. Absolutely. I think, for example, roads only take you to known places. A road takes you to somewhere someone already been. The road never takes you to a new place, right? And I think it's

important to remember, regardless of what you're doing, writing a book or starting a business, that underneath the grid that we are so familiar with, the GPS has mastered. Underneath that grid is a field. And it was always there. And that the grid mapped over it is still arbitrary. It's not a true route, but something that's just been mapped over. But underneath that is the field and you can truly go and you should wander in that field. And that to be lost in it is not to be wrong. Love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting here in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh, a life full of examination. That you can harness what you examine and enact it in satisfying and fulfilling ways with the people you love.

It's very important. I think the question I often ask is how do I make something? How do I make a book? How do I make a poem? And I answer by looking better at the world. But I'm also interested in examining a life thoroughly and looking at a world carefully towards no final object. That's just as important too.

Because to make a book is very rare. Some folks don't have the privilege. Either they don't have time, they don't have the capacity, they're not healthy enough. So I'm more interested, I think the more challenging, the more Herculean and righteous endeavor, admirable one, is to be so curious and open and wonderstruck at the world and do nothing with it other than allow yourself to grow and to communicate with those you love better. No final product, no book, no commodified thing, but just to simply expand as a person. I think that is even more noble and perhaps what most people would end up doing, you know, rather than writing a book or making something. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. in the show notes. And even if you don't listen now, be sure to click and download so it's ready

to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode and then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash futuremba.

That's uvic.ca slash futuremba. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

Find your push. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing

Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk