Jennifer S. Cheng
APAture 2019 Featured Artist Spotlight
PROCLAIM (Literary Arts Showcase), co-presented by Litquake
See Jennifer S. Cheng’s website here. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She also wrote House A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook. She is a 2019 NEA Fellow, Kundiman fellow, and U.S. Fulbright fellow. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she now lives in San Francisco.
This year, we are very proud to feature Jennifer S. Cheng as the headline reader at PROCLAIM, the literary showcase for APAture 2019: DECLARE, co-presented by Litquake. Plan ahead and get your tickets for this Friday, October 18, 7-10pm at Arc Gallery & Studios where the reading will happen! The curators for the showcase also got to ask Jennifer some insightful questions about her work. Learn more in their Q&A with her below:
We love how your work in your latest book is deeply rooted in myths and fables. How was storytelling passed on to you? How has it shaped your poetics?
What a lovely question. The particular myths in my book consist of various Chinese women-centered folktales that I absorbed growing up, and just as other poets write from Greek myths, it was natural for me to draw on 嫦娥 Chang’E, 奴媧 Nu Wa, Snake Sisters, and the Sea Goddess 天后 as narratives from my environment. However, the most vivid memories I have of storytelling in my childhood household are of my siblings and I gathered on my parents’ bed at night while my father used our stuffed animals to tell the tale of 孫悟空 Sun Wu Kong, an epic Chinese legend about the Monkey King. In my memory, my father didn’t progress from beginning to end but leapt between scenes and episodes. My parents are not big storytellers. Everything I accumulated of their own lives and histories came in the form of fragments and subtext. It’s interesting to think there may be a connection between how their stories were passed down to me in this way, and my own poetics, which instinctually inclines toward fragments, nonlinearity, shadows, gaps.
Could you tell us a little about how you conceived the idea for Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems. How did it come to be and how did it all come together?
The project emerged, as with many artistic endeavors, by allowing myself to follow a quiet and gentle obsession. I was living in Hong Kong, across the sea from my husband, after a prolonged depression that was like a slow and sudden dissolving of my voice and body, and while there, I became haunted by the myth of 嫦娥 Chang’E, who floats fatefully to the moon and leaves behind her heroic archer husband. I started writing very tiny iterations of her narrative and later prose poems in her voice. Writing in this way, through a conduit, allowed me to say the things I could not otherwise say, that is, to explore difficult questions of feminine identity, the desire for wilderness, and how we must sometimes unbuild in order to rebuild (world, self, home).
Later, the project came to encompass other contexts. I also began weaving together multiple women-centered myths toward something more polyphonic. In the book I am interested in multiplicity, fluidity, nonlinearity—how storytelling itself might be unbuilt in order to be rebuilt.
MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, Jennifer S. Cheng’s latest book, named a “Best Book of 2018” by Publishers Weekly!
What drives & sustains your work as a writer?
I am always writing into a kind of haunting or inquiry. There is a repeated attempt to say the unsayable, measure the immeasurable, ever drawing close but never quite reaching, like a mathematical asymptote. There is a lingering in the shadowy, unlocatable places and finding the truth and meaning-making that lives there.
Our theme for this year is DECLARE. How, in your work, do you see yourself making declarations?
To focus on the significance of the hidden, the subterranean, the ambiguous—to exist in the margins and examine its textures—is a declaration. My first book, House A, sheds light on the tones and textures of immigrant home-building. The first part, “Letters to Mao,” makes quiet but insistent arguments about the porousness of history and home, and about dislocation as location. The final image-text series, “How to Build an American Home,” asserts the fluidity and multiplicity of categories as much as it asserts the marginal. My second book, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, is a declaration of the “feminine monstrous,” and on a general level it insists on the cultural stories that are familiar and foundational to me.
More and more I have also come to realize that it is not a coincidence that my writing is by nature “hybrid,” nonlinear, fragmented, uncertain. In making articulations the only way I know how, I am declaring over and over the legitimacy of a voice/narrative that pushes against dominant structures of linearity, certainty, authority.
What would be your advice for artists of color writing in the political environment we are in today?
Here is Carl Phillips: “To insist on being who we are is a political act.”
--
We are so excited to feature Jennifer S. Cheng in APAture’s 20th Anniversary Festival, this Friday, October 18, 7-10PM at PROCLAIM!
APAture 2019: DECLARE also runs through October 27 with more showcases to come in film and performing arts. Get your presale tickets and festival passes to all of the events here!