Victoria Chang on Grieving & Revision

Ben Purkert discusses revision and the concept of an obituary with poet Victoria Chang, whose manuscript-in-progress explores the language of the finite. It's inspired, in part, by her experience grieving for a parent, but, as you'll see from their conversation, her observations extend beyond family life to elements of the world that surround us. Chang begins, explaining, "My mom had been sick for so long that I didn’t even realize that I had been grieving while she was sick." From there: 

I wasn’t that young when it started: my dad had a stroke when I was in my thirties, and then my mom got really sick because it was stressful, and she had already been sick with pulmonary fibrosis. I just felt that grieving has been a part of my state of mind for probably more than a decade.

Given that I had young children during that time period, I was also grieving for my old life: my time, my space, my mental space, all that kind of stuff. I feel like now that I’m looking back, I spent the last ten years grieving. I think I had this desire to write about it, but I didn’t know how. Then I was listening to NPR, and they were talking about this documentary called Obit. There’s something about that word “obit”: how it sounds, how short it is, the long “O”, the “T” at the end. I love that word. Then I was just waiting, I think at a stop light, and I thought, “Gosh, when your mom dies or when someone you care about dies, it’s like everything dies.” I think I raced back home, and maybe the next day I wrote a ton of these poems. I die, my clothes die, the bees die, doctors die—all of that opened the floodgates for all these prose poems. That helped me start to distill that grief that I had been experiencing.

Guernica: In this particular poem, the future has died, which seems like the most all-encompassing sort of death there is.

Victoria Chang: Right. Honestly, I think when my mom died I stopped caring about anything. And I was always such a high-achieving ambitious person. I’m just wired that way. I’ve always wanted so many things. But when my mom died, I didn’t want anything anymore.

Continue at Guernica.