By McKenzie Collins and Chelsie Derman
Features Editor and Arts & Entertainment Editor
Victoria Chang may have first been exposed to poetry in Elementary school, but she didn’t start writing poetry herself until later on in life.
Photo credit: Isaac Fitzgerald (Photo courtesy of Victoria Chang)
“I didn’t really know that one could be a poet,” Chang said. “I didn't realize that until well into my twenties, and then I kept on doing it on the side while having jobs and doing other things.”
Chang first tried publishing her work while she was taking poetry classes in college at the University of Michigan. Like many writers, she wanted to see her poems in print and decided to send them out.
By 2017, Chang had developed into such an accomplished poet that she was awarded one of the nation’s most competitive awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship. The experience made her realize she should devote more time to her creative work.
In the same year and her Guggenheim, Chang published “Barbie Chang,” a series of poems that comments on a women's role in society.
2020 was a big year for Chang. She published two books, ”Love, Love,” a novel in verse for middle-schoolers, and “Obit,” a collection of poems about the grieving process. “Love, Love” deals with adolescence and the trauma of experiencing prejudice because of your heritage. The book also tackles mental illness and its effects on family. The sister in “Love, Love” struggles with a form of OCD called Trichotillomania.
“Obit” follows Chang in a first-person narrative poem as she grieves the death of her mother and her father with declining health. She
shapes “Obit” as newspaper obituaries, formatting the page into tight columns. Of all of her published works, “Obit” is the fan favorite and has sold the most copies. However, Chang writes for herself, not necessarily to get a high reader rate.
“I don’t really mind if books aren’t going to be popular; it’s just really fun to try new things and do things that are slightly askew, and that makes me happy,” Chang said. “Whether the book finds a lot of readers or not, I don’t ultimately care, which is what kept me sane over time. I don’t really care that much about reception — that’s how I kept myself honest. Chasing readers is a losing proposition. It’s like querying likes on twitter or Instagram — it doesn’t feed your soul at all.”
Chang adds how a lot of writers obsess over getting readers, which can lead to stress.
“A lot of people believe that the poem isn’t really complete until it finds its reader,” Chang said. “To me, that’s one reader or a million readers — it doesn’t really matter. So I think publishing, and a part of that — sort of eco-sum of finding your readers and completing the poem — can be very demoralizing at times; it can be very hard, but there’s a lot more access now than there was before.”
The success of “Obit” may have to do with the way she writes realistically about the grieving process and the death of her mother. In “Obit,” Chang also continuously returns to the idea that language defines a person, and when that person dies, so does their language.
“I’m always interested in thinking about language because that’s the medium in which I work,” Chang said. “I really enjoy philosophy and literary criticism, and I just like thinking about words and language. When I was writing “Obit”’ I was also kind of thinking about all these larger philosophical things, like I always am.”
Chang points out how when someone dies, it’s not just their body that dies but everything associated with them.
“There’s so many aspects of language that are interesting too and how each culture has come up with all these words, and some languages have conjugations, others don’t,” Chang said. “When you start thinking about it, it’s miraculous. And then we try to describe human feelings and language to human feelings — good luck, it’s really hard.”
While the value of language remains a strong motif throughout all of Chang’s works due to its central placement within her own life, “Barbie Chang” was written with a different intent.
“That book was all about play, so thinking about language again and how language can morph and change. I’m very feminist, so I’m interested in the role of women. I’m always thinking about women, and intersectionality as well. That book is an exploration of what it means to be an American woman,” Chang explained. “At the end of the day, it’s sort of an exploration of gender and our roles in gender and desire and expectations and racism and misogyny — all of those kinds of things that I think about all the time.”
When asked where she finds the founding concepts for her poetry, Chang described a kind of orderly chaos, explaining that she just followed her own rapid train of thought. But while many readers may have chosen a favorite, Chang insists that she loves all of her works equally.
“I’ve enjoyed all of those experiences,” Chang said. “Each one is kind of like birthing a new baby, so to speak. You don’t really have favorites, you just know that’s where your work was at a time and that’s where you were at the time as a person. There’s not one I like more than the other because they all had to happen in that order for everything to be where it is today.”
Throughout her publishing journey, Chang was forced to overcome prejudice in the workplace due to her status as an Asian American woman. She revisits these experiences in “Barbie Chang,” elaborating on the impracticality of the ideal woman.
“One of the biggest challenges was reading around in journals and literary journals and you’re like, ‘hey! Not only is there no one who looks like me in the table of contents, but there’s hardly any women.’ There are no black women, indigenous women, Asian-American women. We’re just not represented. When there’s no room for me you’re like, ‘well, what can you do’? Without social media, it was hard for me to make those changes that people are forcing today.”
To produce more representation within the field, Chang worked with a variety of other poets to produce an anthology titled “Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation.” Even then, she was criticized for beginning her career in editing prior to the publication of her first book, explaining that at the time a book was equal to “street credit, in some ways.”
“It shows you how time has changed — three of us could write now and say, ‘let’s edit an anthology! We could find a publisher or self-publish and edit an anthology. Times have changed,” Chang reiterated. “You don’t need to have this degree or that degree or publish this amount of books with this publisher or that publisher. Yeah, I mean sure, those kinds of elite hierarchical institutions still exist and those biases still exist, but times really have changed.”
Editing and publishing the anthology became an immense task, but for Chang, finding the poets to work on the project and curating the Asian American poetry became a hindrance in itself.
“When I first edited an anthology, I had a lot of hurdles, but I didn’t let those no-sayers and hurdles stop me from collecting the few Asian American poets around that were writing at the time. And there were a lot more than the ones I edited. And obviously, it was harder to find who they were when you didn’t have social media or the internet and stuff like that. All along the way — and even today people say all sorts of sexist and misogynist, racist stuff – they don’t even realize it,” she said.
Chang fought through the deterrents thrown at her, but ultimately her success sprouted from her determination and consistent appreciation for prose.
“For me, there were many years when I didn't write a word,” Chang said. “I was busy and I was doing other things — and that’s fine, too, because you may also return to things. I think it happens a lot when you get older. You return to some of your first true loves.”
