By Emily Velasquez
Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. This is a collection that captures the personal process of living with grief and exploring its meaning through a multimedia lens. I was immensely moved by this collection and beyond grateful that Nguyen shared her journey of creating Ghost Of with me in our conversation.
Emily Velasquez: How did you begin writing this collection? Were there any moments in the process where you were unsure about including certain pieces to this book?
Diana Khoi Nguyen: The book began after the death of my brother in 2014, as I grappled to recognize and live through my grief. For a long time, I wasn’t sure what I felt or if I felt anything, and that was alarming. Concurrent with this, a lot of all the memories from my childhood emerged as I returned home for the funeral and attempted to reconcile the estranged relationship with my parents. I usually write in intensive spurts twice a year, and one of those spurts overlaps with the anniversary of my brother’s death. This book was written in roughly 30 days, albeit spread out across different writing marathons.
To be honest, I was unsure about including all of the poems in the book, unsure about offering this book for publication because it is so personal; it not only talks about family members, but also includes photographs of them. I ultimately decided to keep it intact, as a record of what I went through during that time, and because writing the book gave me company in grief, it is and was my hope that the book could provide some company for others who might be feeling alone in their particular kind of unruly grief.
“Writing the book gave me company in grief, it is and was my hope that the book could provide some company for others who might be feeling alone in their particular kind of unruly grief.”
EV: What was your initial process behind the title? What does Ghost Of mean to this collection, and to you as a poet?
DKN: The title for the book was one that somebody else had suggested to me long before I wrote any of the poems in the book, including the poem from which the title takes its name. I think I’ve always had a lot of shadows, forms, and specters in my work long before my brother died. This is just another way of saying that I have been haunted for a very long time and the ways in which I have been haunted continue to emerge in my work. Before my brother died, I lived in fear that he would die, and there wasn’t much relief after his death, because all the fear and dread turned into this immense sorrow.
EV: One of the techniques that fascinated me the most about your work is the way you recycle sounds and words within your poems. For example, in your poem, “Triptych,” you mention, “everyone has a sound there is no sound for there is no sound there for everyone is there anyone between the sound and the silence, some solitary figure ambling along the loop, no sound, no sound…”. What was your idea behind this type of repetition?
DKN: The repetition wasn’t intentional, but I found that constraint of choice brought me much relief in the craziness that is the aftermath of a suicide in the family. It felt too overwhelming to continue to be alive, but it was easier to have a limited menu of options to choose from in terms of actions and speech. Naturally, this found a way into my poems when I started writing again. And working in the prose poem form inspired by the walls and the cuts of the family photographs felt very much like a cell in which I was pacing back-and-forth.
EV: Were there any poems that you wanted to change after the collection had been published? Which piece in this collection was the most difficult to write and how was that process for you?
DKN: No, I don’t wish to change any of the poems in the collection. Actually, now the poems feel foreign to me, or distant, like when you encounter a photograph of yourself as a child. You can remember the memory, but don’t really remember being in the photograph, or the photograph being taken. All of these poems were difficult; in particular, those which engaged directly the photographic archive that my brother left behind, the family pictures where he cut himself out.
EV: The poem, “Gyotaku” pays close attention to elvers, which the Oxford dictionary defines as young eels that journey into migration upriver from the sea. In this poem, what was your idea of an elver in relation to your brother, Oliver? Why an elver?
DKN: In my family, all of the children had nicknames which ended up being the last syllable of our names. For my brother, his nickname was “ver.”
Coincidentally, I was watching a nature documentary about eels and learned about their life stages. I was really struck in particular by the elver, the adolescent stage of the eel, because that is when the eel makes its journey from the ocean deep to freshwater, the opposite of a salmon’s journey. But because of what humans have done to many waterways, the journey has been very difficult for some elvers. I stumbled across and was deeply moved by this one YouTube video of elvers struggling to climb a dam wall. They would crawl up and then fall down and then crawl up and then fall down—watching this reminded me of Oliver in his adolescence, when his moods began to shift and darken, how difficult everything was for him from that period on, all the way through to his death.
Of course, there’s also the sonic quality: what I hear and read the word “elver,” I hear and think of Oliver.
EV: Throughout this collection you work closely with space. What was significant to you when trying to decide how to use space in each of these pieces?
DKN: My relationship to space on the page is quite organic and intuitive. Nothing is planned, but it happens as I’m writing. I compose with each space, just as I compose with each word and punctuation mark. For the “Triptych” poems, space is dictated by the space or voids within the photographs.
EV: What does your day-to-day writing process look like? What excites you, motivates you to keep writing after you’ve hit slump seasons in your writing life?
DKN: As I touched upon earlier, I write in 15 day intensive intervals about twice a year: once in the summer, and once in December leading up to my brother’s death anniversary. This helps me to separate my work life from my writing life since I’m on an academic schedule as a professor. During the periods when I’m not writing, I’m gathering material, taking notes, reading, and being a sponge receiving everything, wondering what spores are embedding inside my imagination.
Ghost Of is available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, The Booksmith, Eso Won Books, Green Bean Books, Talking Leaves Books, Townie Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.