The first time I heard Jennifer Tseng speak was in 2019, at a reading from her novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness. The reading was a part of her job application for the open assistant professorship in literature & creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She got the job, of course.
The first time Jennifer heard me speak was over voice recording. In the fall of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, she asked her incoming advanced fiction students to share a recording of themselves reading a passage from one of their favorite books.
The first time we met was over Zoom. I was skeptical at first. She introduced a method of workshopping, the Critical Response Process, that I’d never heard of. She made us do in-class exercises and submit weekly drafts. She brought me out of my comfort zone at a time where comfort was all I wanted. But it didn’t take long for me to realize her brilliance. She chose excellent readings, provided clear and compassionate feedback, and had an altogether massive impact on my language and development as a writer. But more than anything, I appreciated how she found a way to make the most out of a period of profound loss. After reading her latest collection of poems, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, which is written in conversation with lines from her late father’s letters, it’s clear little has changed.
Over a mix of emails, voice memos, and Zoom, we discussed her book, the power to commune with the dead, and the strange ability we have to go on loving those who’ve hurt us the most.
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Caleb Berg: How did you conceive of this book, and could you describe its writing process?
Jennifer Tseng: For years, I carried a box of my father’s letters with me, and somewhere in the back of my mind I had a thought that only a poet or an artist would have: this is a gold mine. (My father, who always lamented my lack of financial savviness, would have laughed at that.) My dream was to make a book of poems with the letters, I wasn't sure how, and it took a very long time for me to feel ready to try. In the beginning, I would read his letters and fall into a hole for hours, so I made a rule that I could only read two letters a day. I would choose a sentence that I liked, write it at the top of the page, and wait for something to happen. Sometimes nothing happened, but sometimes the sentence would give me a poem. I also typed up pages of sentences I loved, and cut them into strips and then moved them around on the floor you know, like mahjong tiles, trying out different combinations.
Working with his letters was incredible; it was like getting to be in a room with him again. Of course, I'd always dreamed it would be like that, which is why I wanted to do it, and yet I still wasn't prepared for how alive he felt. It was astonishing. One day I spent the morning working with his letters, and later I met my daughter and my mother-in-law for dinner. I burst into the restaurant, so excited, and started to say, “My dad said the funniest thing this morning!” I had to stop myself, because no he hadn’t said that, but it felt like he had; it felt like we’d spent the morning together. It felt like that so many mornings.
It was a privilege to be able to commune with him, and also strangely empowering to realize that I have the ability to activate that connection. I think we all have this power. Talking about it now, I wonder if I even needed the letters to do it. I don't know.
CB: I think we all wish we could have said more to the ones we've lost. Was there anything in particular you felt you needed to tell your father by writing these poems?
JT: This might sound absurd or even like a lie coming from someone with a book like mine, but I didn't feel like I needed to say anything to my father when I wrote it. I felt strangely at peace with him when he died; it was as if we understood each other and could safely separate from each other because we knew that we would always somehow be connected. Your question begs the question of audience and reveals that while I certainly loved communing with him via the letters, I wasn't only talking to him while I was reading and writing. It wasn't so much that I needed to tell him something that I couldn't tell him when he was alive; it was more that there were things I needed to say for myself, maybe even to myself. There's a way in which it was simply my turn to speak. For years he controlled the narrative in our house and now I can talk back, so this book is as much a claiming of speech, any speech, as it is a letter to him containing a particular message. And of course, he still managed to speak, to talk back to my talking back.
CB: Was there anything he managed to say you found yourself particularly surprised by?
JT: The book’s title comes to mind—it’s not exactly an example of this, but the sense of surprise I experience while reading it is similar. All my life people have likened me to my father both physically and temperamentally. He himself used to call me his duplicate. It wasn’t until after I’d chosen his line, Thanks for letting us know you are alive, for the title—a line I’ve heard in his voice for so many years—that I heard my own voice saying it to him. There was something surprisingly primal about that. When I say the line to him, I’m both a child whose father is giving her language and a woman who has become her father and speaks to him using his language.
CB: Speaking of titles… I was struck by the complexity of emotions conveyed in the titles borrowed from your father - titles like “I tried my best and there is a limit to my patience” and “Dear Baby: You are approaching the end of your rope.” And your poems themselves, especially the latter, embrace this complexity, often take it as their subject, their material. It’s left me with this question that’s been haunting my own work lately, which is how do you—how can you—love somebody who has hurt you so deeply? Could you speak at all to that?
JT: I, too, am so haunted by this question! You are perfectly articulating for me one of the central concerns of my new book in which I grapple with the sudden loss of someone whom I deeply love and who has hurt me deeply. How do we love someone who has hurt us? I don’t know! I’m trying to learn! On some days I feel like the poems themselves are the answer to this question. They are the evidence of attachment, the proof of love. If you love someone, your love doesn’t die when they hurt you. Love keeps going even when we feel like we can’t. Whether or not we ask the question, love keeps answering.
CB: The poems in this collection are so playful. In addition to playing with your father’s letters (like mahjong tiles), your poems often propel through common roots, rhyme, and the associative logic of words. Could you talk a little about the importance and function of linguistic play in these poems?
JT: My father was a very playful person who loved music. My mother taught me the joy of playing with words; she was the great Chinglish innovator of my childhood. Because of them, I was both fascinated and bewildered by language. The book The Same-Different by Hannah Sanghee Park helped me return to that time I spent as a child with my parents, playing the piano in a bilingual household. I love the way Park makes poems. She allows the “associative logic of words” that you mentioned to guide her. When I’m reading her poems, I have the sense that she's discovering the poem as she goes, looking inside each word to find the next one. Her process bows down to something greater than the self. It wants to discover, and it wants to allow, as if the encounter with the poem is a kind of encounter with fate; she doesn't know what’s going to happen and she’s willing to find out. And I think because I was working with the dead, I wanted to allow for as much dictation as possible, if that makes sense. This might sound like a contradiction because I know I said I was writing a book in order to speak, but I think both are true. I wanted a seance and I wanted a conversation.
CB: Speaking to the element of conversation, I feel like so much power in these poems derives from the fact that it’s not necessarily you nor your father who’s speaking, but the poem itself infused with your voices. And within that sonic space, we’re able to see that no word from your father's letters is too small for you to use. Articles, pronouns, and prepositions are consistently borrowed from your father and placed in italics. I feel like this choice defamiliarized these unsung words in the English language—words like “it” or “the” or “in” that are typically only used functionally—and restored their objective and lyric qualities, further illustrating your desire for your father’s language.
JT: Yes, I think for non-native speakers even the smallest words are defamiliarized, and you're right that no word from my father's letters is too small to use. That makes me think of the way certain words come to belong to certain writers. I can’t think of the word beloved without thinking of Toni Morrison, or the word rose without thinking of Shakespeare and Li-Young Lee. And Madeleine, you know that belongs to Proust. So in the case of my father, it's like what Henri Cole says about being Catholic: it's like swimming in the nude; it touches you everywhere. My father has touched all of language for me, and I'm trying to touch it too.
CB: “Touched all of language for you”—I love that. Your mention of these other writers brought up this question I love to ask, which is who do you consider your most important literary foreparents, those writers who’ve also “touched your language”? If it helps narrow it down, you might think of your answer in terms of a Mount Rushmore: the four most important, or the four who most immediately come to mind.
JT: In Chinese, four is the number associated with death! (Because it sounds like the word for death.) The four mothers who spring to mind first are Ai, Lucille Clifton, Fanny Howe, and Jean Valentine.
CB: This is a bit of a changeup, but I feel like it’s worth mentioning that I never would have applied to the MFA at the University of Houston if you hadn’t put it on my radar. And since I’m graduating in the spring, the question of what’s next is constantly on my mind. I wonder if you might speak a little to your experience(s) at UH, and how it’s shaped your vision/career as a writer and educator?
JT: My experience as a student at UH has very much shaped my teaching and my vision of the kind of workshop ethos I want to foster. I joined directly after finishing my MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA, a program that was virtually 100% POC with a vibrant sense of community, so the MFA program at UH was a culture shock for me. Keep in mind this was over twenty years ago. Often, I was the only person of color, and I was always the only woman of color in the workshop. One student’s comment has stayed with me: “There are too many languages being spoken in this story!” This comment enraged me—its ignorance, its tactlessness, its unacknowledged bias. How many languages is too many? For whom? It took me a long time to cool my jets enough to realize that there may very well have been some constructive feedback locked inside their comment, but that their phrasing and their delivery made it difficult for me to access it. Comments like this drew me to Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process which emphasizes the importance of neutral questions, permissioned opinions, and bias transparency. I am forever grateful to honorary UH alum Allegra Hyde for introducing me to this workshop method. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized it was someone who taught at UH (whom I didn’t meet until years later) who gave me the antidote to the poison of that unforgettable comment, and that makes me happy and gives me hope.
CT: To wrap things up, I thought I might ask one last big question. What did this book do for you, and what do you think it can do for others? And within that, is there anything you think poetry can do that nothing else can?
JT: I never think about questions like this, especially when I'm writing, because if I did, I would be paralyzed. Even now that the book is finished, they’re difficult questions to answer. The book kept me company, it helped me grieve. It helped me realize how ordinary I am, just how very human my experience is. When I think of other people reading it, I think of G.E. Patterson's line from his book To and From... “That loss you know might become anyone.” To me that's the terror and the dream. On the one hand connection with an/other is a dream, on the other hand, to be healed through connection is to watch your grief join the grief of the collective, which is also sort of to witness the disappearance of Self.
I love thinking about what poetry can do that nothing else can, but I don't know that I have a fresh answer or any answer to it. Poetry is music… It can raise the dead… It can transform emotion… It can still emotion… It can stop time… It can reassure people of our love for them and reassure them of their belonging in the bigger scheme of things. How is that different from what a song or a painting can do? I don't know if it is. After all these years I don't fully understand how poetry works and that's part of its allure. I still don't know what it's capable of, what it allows; I'm discovering that all the time. There's something deeply compelling to me about a poem that collaborates with an existing text, a poem that draws its power not just from the poet but from sources outside the poet as well. My father's lines expand the sense of time and music in the poems. The poems are more voluminous thanks to him because they contain his notes, too, and you know, our lives together were not always in harmony (laughing). Sometimes the result is dissonance, but the sonic landscape is fuller and more spacious thanks to his language and his presence.
I don’t know what the book can do for others. I do know that it can be a deep comfort to witness someone else's suffering, someone else's struggle on the page, to be allowed to witness that, and that that kind of reading experience can relieve us of our own suffering and struggles, remind us that we're not alone, that we’re doing it together, and that—that’s the dream. That said, I think you’re much better suited to answering this question than I am. Here I am talking to someone who's read it so I feel like I should ask you.
CB: Reading your book, and even more so getting the opportunity to interview you about it, has been an emotionally and intellectually galvanizing experience. It’s inspired me to look differently at grief, to see it as a complex process and project of change. And through that your book has reminded me that literature has an ability to recontextualize what it means to be alive. In that sense, the title says it all.
