First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Mai Der Vang about her new poetry collection, Primordial.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: You write in a poem called Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am, “There is /no such thing as new pain,/ only the same pain recycled a/ hundred ways.” I wanted to ask you about that line.
Mai Der Vang: Yeah, I think that line, for me, sort of connects to the idea of generational trauma, and it sort of evokes this notion that a lot of what we experience and encounter through loss and through grief and through trauma, is perhaps, oftentimes, a lot of what we are still working through that could be unresolved. You know, I think a lot about Hmong elders who have a lot of unacknowledged trauma, for themselves and unacknowledged by others in some ways, too. And so, for me, it almost feels like we just end up recycling a lot of that trauma again and again without a chance to really reopen and reckon with it. So, I guess that’s what I sort of wanted to recall in those few lines. It’s funny you mentioned that poem too, because when I wrote that poem I was thinking about twinning with this animal. You know, feeling as though I inside and in my writing and in what I see of who I am, I am just as feral, you know, as any animal might be, too.
Mitzi Rapkin: Does writing have any release of intergenerational trauma for you?
Mai Der Vang: You know, I think it begins the process, perhaps, I don’t know if it ever fully resolves it, but I do think it helps to begin the process. It begins to unpack things in ways that might be very uncomfortable or unsettling. It may even put, you know, sort of pressure on the wound itself; and by doing that, it allows for something new to perhaps be addressed. And so, I think that the more I write about what I write about, and the more that I reckon with these things, personally and maybe even collectively, as part of a shared history, it’s sort of slowly beginning to unpack some of that stuff. And I don’t know that it’ll ever fully be addressed to the level of healing, but I think there’s something about the process of writing, too, after you’ve finished a piece of writing, there is something very healing about having finished just a piece of writing, and maybe by virtue of thinking about it in that terms, that you finished a piece of writing. Oh, that feels good. You know, there’s healing in that, perhaps.
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Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial, Yellow Rain, and Afterland. Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.