Where did you go to graduate school? HS: And grief is not something you can control. Chang resists conventional elegy, writing not only about the dead but to them. These are all bigger questions that are always so interesting to me. I think both of those writers were Gertrude Stein-y, playing and viewing writing and language as Lego blocks. Every writing class or seminar will suddenly be Okay, were all going to write an obit. I think its definitely going to be a thing. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. People have much worse experiences, though. Each person feels differently. They participated in a Korean variety relationship show "We Got Married" together as CP a few years ago. Born and raised in Michigan, Chang has made California home for decades. But that word triggered something in me. I really miss that, just the random conversations that you have. And isnt that just like grief, how we often work to bury our sorrow, but there it is aching away in some corner of our mind? Grief is very asynchronous. History For as much as Chang wants to get personal with her parents history, her grief and her relationship to or disconnect from Chinese American culture, the language and structure sets her at a cool intellectual distance. 249 Its awful. Kellogg is a former books editor of the Times and can be found on Twitter @paperhaus. Victoria Chang-Mishra, PA-C is a certified physician assistant and provides a variety of primary care services to adults including chronic disease management, neurological disorders and community outreach. Dr. Chang is a board certified and fellowship trained Bariatric and Laparoscopic Surgeon who specializes in various weight loss procedures as well as general surgery procedures such as hernia repairs, acid reflux surgeries and many more. Victoria Chang - Poet, Writer, and Editor Victoria Chang ABOUT Victoria Chang's forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair Books in the U.K. Its a very out of body experience. In addition to editing, she writes children's books and teaches in Antioch Universitys MFA program. I feel like I have that double grief to deal with. A decade before her mother died, Chang conducted an interview with her. Because its like BC, Before Child, and then its AC, After Child. The book does follow these axes, each one leading to existential concerns about the impressions we leave on our loved ones and the world around us and how the world and our loved ones, and the histories they carry, imprint on us. Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. No listings were found. Then I went home and wrote these little obituaries where everything dies. We finally lived in the same city, and she was really sick, and then my dad was sick, and so I was around them a lot. Each opens with subjectdied and the date. I knew people who cut grapes into fours. In one of their conversations most wrenching moments, Changs mother recalls a memory from her journey to Taiwan: I still remember a woman holding a small childs hand to get on the boat and then she realized it wasnt her child. What did she do?, Chang asks. Was it really soon after your mother died? I write, and whatever I write, it all bleeds around in different things, manifests themselves in different ways. VC: Exactly. Certain losses change your grammar. The books of poems were just okay, but not for me. Then also, its so lonely. I had this conversation with my husband, who lost his parents decades and decades ago, and for him, its very ephemeral. I think a lot of poets have depressive tendencies, and I certainly do. The things were working on dont ever end. Chang uses other writers as points of reference in both her existential queries and the hybrid formal space in which Dear Memory exists. I noticed its been published in pieces, so I was just curious about where that came from? Whereas, I think in the past, my books and my work were more intellectually based. In one of your poems, you write, Sadness is plural, but grief is singular. How is that idea reflected in what weve experienced this past year? Everybody brings stuffed animals to the dying, but kids like stuffed animals, not the dying. Her newest hybrid book of prose is Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021). They are brimming with questions. 'Barbie Changs Tears': Expanding the Autobiographical, Weekly Podcast for October 10, 2016: Victoria Chang reads"Barbie Chang". We can understand and see whats happened to the speaker in these, but we can also see ourselves in it. I didnt want to write about my mother at all, or the feelings that I felt. Had you always planned to stay? It forced me to work doubly hard. VC: Yes, because the obits can be so suffocating because of their form, and its a lot to read again and again, and they can be really tough. I kind of miss that. HS: Which is amazing. Its just not a part of my family upbringing. Her most recent poetry book, OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. All content by Victoria Chang. Victoria Chang finds the poetry in the news of the obituary. All her deaths had creases except this one. In April, her fifth collection of poems, Obit (Copper Canyon Press) will be published and is certain to become a definitive poetic guide to grief. VC: You were saying something earlier that was really smart about grief being so personal and yet so universal. After my mother died, I looked at a photo where she had moved into assisted living from the ER. When someone you care about dies, if theyre a big part of your life at least, which my mom obviously was, especially because she was so sick and my dad was sick too, everything dies. There may be one clear point of connection between the image and the words in that first collage, the phone that Chang notes is ringing is the phone hanging on the wall in the photograph but these connections are either too literal or virtually nonexistent. I still feel like so much of grieving is private, though, because each person grieves differently. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. This happened, or That happened, or What do you think of that, that kind of thing. Victoria Chang Winzone Realty Inc. Victoria Chang is a poet and writer living in Los Angeles. The writer Victoria Chang lost her mother six years ago, to pulmonary fibrosis. VC: Right. It was named one of Electric Literatures Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2021. I am such a Californian, she tells me via Zoom from her place in the South Bay. This week we are thrilled to feature a previously unpublished poem by Victoria Chang. But it wasnt until I stopped doing that, which was probably by the third book, that my real personality came out, which is filled with questions and no answers. Victoria Chang, poet and author of Obit, a finalist for a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize in Poetry, will read from her collection on the L.A. Times Virtual Poetry Stage.For more, go to events.latimes.com/festivalofbooksIf you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The editors discuss Victoria Changs poem Obit in the July/August 2018 issue of Poetry. And I am just so excited to get them out into the world. . Two writers you cite are Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath; they both committed suicide. VICTORIA CHANG'S poetry. We make it up as we go. Thats why I like to read, and thats why I like to write, because its the only thing that feels like its not time-based, and its not moving forward. That was in the poem too. Residential For Sale . Victoria Chang. In Obit, longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking A designer who works with Copper Canyon Press sent me all these things and this cover freaked the [crap] out of me, to be honest. Its hard to find resolution in these pieces, which is mostly fine until the work fumbles to whittle down the general those vast abstractions like memory, silence and history, all of which she addresses in Dear Memory into an autobiographical reckoning. MARFA "I'm sort of an extroverted and cheery person," said Victoria Chang, a poet and Lannan Foundation fellow who returned to Los Angeles last weekend. I write very quickly because of the way that my brain functions. HS: Yeah, time breaks for the living. And so the decaying present she refers to becomes her fathers memory loss, and with it a loss of a cultural history with only Americanness to replace it. Who doesnt have questions when were talking about death, or existential things, and grief? She lives in Southern California with her family and works in business. Theres a lot of religion in our culture that we dont even realize is here. . Each move granted the next generation access to the kind of future the previous one could only imagine. She felt so isolated by caregiving that she started writing down her anger, her fear, her frustration in notebooks that eventually became the poems in Obit, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Im certainly not even remotely I mean, we grow up and we are grown, and then we die. At 49, Chang is a smiley and chatty author who got into writing . 12/9/2022. 2023 Cond Nast. Except that it takes this unique form in each of us, and it shifts around. Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still, whether it can be trusted to secure a safe landing for that dangling preposition. Youre playing with the puzzle, and you get sort of lost, and its a perfect thing. and What happens when we die? 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ETAt first, Sharon Olds's poem seems to be about a simple condiment. Such a clich. When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history interchange with the specific details of her life. VC: Right. Victoria Chang's Correspondence with Grief In "Dear Memory," Chang experiments with the grammar of loss, addressing letters to those who will never respond, and finding meaning in their. I think the reason why this book resonates with other people too is because a lot of people are grieving. "I get along with just about everyone.". Then everybody who worked at Copper Canyon Press, they loved this cover. HS: You take on those larger questions and ideas, and you address the minutiae of our lives. It was so strange. Chang attempts to access lost familial memory in Obit, a series of poetic obituaries composed as Chang grieves for her . Tracy K. Smith; David Lehman, eds. Which was funny. Thats what I feel when I read. 1. I think theres that desire to not only stop time, but to get outside of it, and if its still moving and youre outside of it, that feels really interesting to me. I think theres been something oddly comforting about knowing that the whole world is going through something together, where this idea of collective grieving has emerged. Her fifth book of poems, OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020.It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize and was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and long . She attributes her cheerful appearance in part to the orthodontic treatment she . With this issue, we are publishing three of Changs Obit poems, My Mothers Favorite Potted Treedied in 2016, a slow death, Similesdied on August 3, 2015, and Tomas Transtrmerdied on March 26, 2015, at the age of 83. I know you will enjoy reading them alongside the following excerpt from my conversation with Chang, wherein we discuss poetry and how loss is life-changing, sometimes in a good way. She spoke to the Times about writing, grief, dark humor and what its been like talking about a book about mourning during the pandemic. Im working on another middle grade novel now where the grandfather is sick. "Changs work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self.". She was a pain, and she was a hard-ass, but I really talked to her a lot in the last, maybe, 15 years. All rights reserved. I think most of them had been published in various journals, and I just left them in a drawer. Victoria Justice dated boyfriend Reeve Carney for a while. Except they were leading the oddest parallel lives. VICTORIA CHANG IS interested in the space between things. And because it falls in the middle of the collection, it is a way to sort of stop and slow everything down. But then I could actually connect with her, because I knew what she sort of felt. And in those letters, Changs dogged adherence to form is admirable, but the epistolary format often suffocates the work. The autobiographical becomes the universal. Victoria Changdied unknowingly on June 24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway. I have a very obsessive personality, for better or for worse. The same with foods like apple sauce. These incisions take a literal form in collages that Chang intersperses throughout the book, made from fragments of her familys informal archivephotographs, government documents, snippets of correspondencewhich she manipulates, sometimes cutting away elements of the documentary record, often adding anachronistic commentary. Thats how you learn how to write. People? If your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone. Lacunae. I always say you can build it and break it you can always build something else. The unspeakable. Thank you! I just started writing them, and I think I was looking for something to do that was different, and I was just kind of messing around, and I remember I just jammed them all in the back of the manuscript all together. One didn't show up because her husband was in prison. I was really much more driven by my feelings, versus my mind. Her parents were immigrants from Taiwan. I was thinking Oh, it must leak out somehow. Could I even describe these feelings? I never even thought I had a sentimental bone in my body, but suddenly all the feelings started emerging. And I noticed that your second collection, Salvinia Molesta, has poems about Mao's fourth wife, . In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Contact Information. The book is a catalogue of losses, from the obviously traumatic (My Mother, My Fathers Frontal Lobe) to the seemingly trivial (Voice Mail, Similes). She noted the presence of characters in liminal states and women struggling with restrictive roles, observing that Chang's "rueful wit and sense of irony undercut any sense of self-righteousness.". Then, my mind naturally moves a lot, so my brain is absolutely like a pinball machine, the way it works, and sometimes its too much, its too fast. VC: Absolutely. HS:Were having some good laughs throughout all of this, even though were talking about some pretty rough stuff. But I think that was what I had to do, because I wanted to make my mom happy, and I wanted her to be proud of me. This book, I think, was a combination of the heart and the mind. [2] She graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Asian Studies, Harvard University with an MA in Asian Studies, and Stanford Business School with a MBA. DEAR MEMORYLetters on Writing, Silence, and GriefBy Victoria Chang, In a letter addressed to the reader in her book Dear Memory, the poet Victoria Chang explains why she chose the epistolary format: These letters were a way for her to speak to the dead, the not-yet-dead. They would steer her toward her parents, her history and, ultimately, toward silence. Im known to be a tough person and not sentimental a tough cookie, you know, I just deal with stuff. Our mission is to get Southern California reading and talking. I think that I took that mission to heart, and in fact, that mission replaced my heart. We havent talked about the tankas yet. Im hardly reformed. Yeah. It was a personal challenge: could I genuinely make the reader feel what I feel? In one collage, the answers (1964; YOU DONT NEED TO WRITE IT DOWN; OH NO NO NO) are superimposed on an architectural diagram of a suburban home, similar to the one where Chang grew up. This is a childs fantasy of connection. Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, University of Pittsburgh '17. VC: Yeah, it deepens you. She lives in Southern California with her family. Victoria Chang was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1970 and raised in the suburb of West Bloomfield. There is also no mention of God or Jesus.. All rights reserved. Its not a big deal. HS: But one of the things that I noticed is that there are a lot of questions inserted into the obits. Her sixth book of poems, The Trees Witness Everything, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2022. Could you talk a little bit about how those came about, and what they mean within the overall collection for you? The obits are for her parents, but also for everything that changes when someone dies. June 23, 2014. Outside of the office, Victoria enjoys being outdoors, spending time with friends, traveling with her husband, and volunteering. Get Victoria Chang's email address (v*****@htc.com) and phone number (+886 921 030..) at RocketReach. But my mission in life, my mother gave to me, was always to be really successful at whatever I did. On a daily basis, Im constantly making jokes. I think the biggest philosophical questions are, What happens when were dying? It was named a New York Times Notable Book. In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust famously describes the transformation of himself as an author. Time breaks for the living eventually and they can walk out of doors. I was taught to be strong, and to be that pillar, all the time. Her obit poems explore whats gone missing, failure, and brokenness. "It is who I am in terms of identity, in. Which is exactly how grief functions. This was not her first death. Because I was very much in my head all the time. I receive no letter. Those are Emily Dickinsons words, sent to friends, which Chang quotes in a letter of her own. In one letter, Chang asks her mother about leaving China for Taiwan: I would like to know if you took a train. That dichotomy is so bizarre. I really appreciate people who are funny, because I think to be funny is to have a certain kind of brain, and I definitely have that kind of brain.