All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost is Lan Samantha Chang’s third book. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s the recipient of many literary honors including the the Banta Award for Literature, and the PEN/Hemingway/Ucross Prize. Her award-winning first collection, Hunger and Other Stories, and debut novel, Inheritance, both won widespread acclaim and have been translated across the world. Her shorter work was selected for Best American Short Stories in 1994 and 1996. And she’s been director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop since 2006—an experience she’s plumbed for her new novel.
Complete Interview [Download Podcast]
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost begins at The School in Bonneville, Michigan, a fictional Graduate MFA program with similarities to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Roman, a young poetry student, is handsome and ambitious, obsessed with achieving artistic greatness and worldly recognition. His cerebral counterpart Bernard lives an ascetic life, corresponding by mail with other authors from his shoebox apartment and privately toiling on a single long poem. Both young men, with the other students at The School, vie for the affections of Miranda Sturgis, an eccentric faculty luminary who allures pupils with her talent and fame but terrorizes them with her mercurial disposition and brutal criticism.
At first, the novel extols, and often wryly critiques, the triumphs and pratfalls of Workshop life. But as the students mature, the novel grows in seriousness with them. In its 200 pages, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost charts a series of lives lived in the name of art, and maps their vastly different outcomes. The book poses serious questions about the value of artistic sacrifice, the dubious gift of early promise, the patronage and nepotism of the academy, and the definition of artistic greatness. Finally, it moves beyond poetry altogether as we watch our characters meet their human fates, address the slow onset of their mortality, the wax and wane and wax again of their close friendships over time, and the regrets and longings that unspool in the wake of death.
Complete Interview
Joe Fassler: I sometimes think of your other long works as backwards-looking, tracing family
history and asking questions about inheritance and racial identity, moving back through
generations. This book is different. There are no first-generation immigrants or their children.
There are few questions about ancestry or genealogy. Do you agree that this book is forward-
looking in a way that makes it different than Hunger and Inheritance, and if so can you describe
how settled on this shift in orientation?
Lan Samantha Chang: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think about it in terms of looking forward except that
it seems to have put me in a new space with my writing, and it’s very curious to know what I’m
going to write next. I don’t have any idea at the moment. After I finished my novel Inheritance,
which took about 10 years, I was unproductive for a few years. And I think I reached the end of a
creative period. I had very little desire to write anything new, and when I did write, it seemed to
me that the work was lacking, I wasn’t very enthusiastic.
I don’t know why that is the case, except that I think that I had written through a lot of the
material that I came into my writing life with. I was here as a student in 1991, and I left in ’93,
and during that time, I had always known that I wanted to learn to write decent short stories, and
that I would also like to write something about “China”, because my parents are from China, and
it was a big deal to us when we were growing up in Wisconsin that our parents knew so much
about a country where we’d never been.
So, after I’d written through all that, which took about 12 years of writing and thinking, I paused
and thought about what to do next. I came up with ideas that weren’t particularly interesting
to me, and some that were. There were a couple of pieces that I started and gave up on. And
then in the summer — well, no, in the spring of 2006, I started detaching at the workshop and
became director of the program. This was a huge change for me. I had never held a permanent
full-time job before in my life. I had always deliberately taken positions, even after I published a
book ,that would end, because I didn’t want anything to take over my life. I wanted to save it for
the work.
And many things, as I say, happened. I finished Inheritance, I got married I guess the year that
Inheritance was published, 2004, in 2006 I started at the workshop as director, and in 2007,
I had a baby. So, what happened was, in the summer of 2006, after finishing a somewhat
wild first semester as director of the workshop, I went out of the country to France, where my
husband was at a painting school in the middle of nowhere. It was so remote that it wasn’t even
on Google Earth. And I was just in this little tiny country apartment with jetlag, and the first
morning I was there, I sat down and opened my computer and started working on this. And I
had been interested in working about poets for some time.
I feel that the novel, now that I’ve finished with it, I feel like I began to learn the material for the
novel 15 years before I started writing it, which is when I came to the workshop and began to
see what the writing life was like. Before I came to Iowa, I’d never been able to sit down and
write for long stretches, I’d never been able to define myself as a writer. And I didn’t know it was
happening at the time, but I was apprenticing myself to a process that was connected inevitably
to the academy.
And this is something I also didn’t know. I thought I would finish my term at the workshop and
go do something else, I don’t know what. And many people do leave the workshop and go work,
maybe as writers, maybe as editors, teachers, but I ended up getting an academic fellowship,
a Stegner fellowship, that sent me on a path, I think, more than coming here, that pointed me
in the direction of institutions. And institutions and writing are a strange combination, because
writers are by nature somewhat rebellious, somewhat uninstitutional by nature, a little bit
solitary, and somewhat skeptical.
And I think that what I began to observe was the different ways that writers and institutions
interacted. I’m still thinking about it all the time, I still find it fascinating, which I suppose is one
of the reasons why I’m teaching here. The thing that happened was, I wanted to write about
poets because it seems to me that the poet’s life distills an artistic life in a way that a novelist’s
life doesn’t necessarily, for this reason: that most of the poets I know, know they’re not going
to make very much money off of their work at all. I think a lot of novelists can labor under a
delusion that at some point they will sell their books for money and someone will like the book
and buy it, and they will be able to if not make a living, at least partially make a living off of their
work.
I think most of the poets I know totally don’t go into it with the idea of money in mind. And
so, their choices are to a certain extent more distinct. There’s a more distilled quality to their
decisions, the lives they live. I know this only having watched poets, of course. I am not a poet
myself. I find poets fascinating, and I admire them enormously because of the choices that they
make. And I was always interested in writing about them, but I didn’t understand how much the
book was going to be about the passage of time and the foibles of teachers and students, until
after I started at the workshop.
So that summer, I sat down when I was in France and wrote 50 pages in two weeks, which I’ve
never done before in my life. And the pages had in them all the main — not all, but a lot of the
main scenes of part one, a big scene in part two, a conversation between Roman and his wife,
Lucy, a fight they have, and then the final scene between two of the characters at the very end
of the story.
So, I had all that, I had it all figured out. It just came out of me, but of course, I hadn’t been
writing seriously for almost three years at that point. And I think that the transitions that I’d been
going through had been putting all this material in my mind, but I didn’t know it. You know, the
material of marriage and friendship, and the way that life changes, and the transition from being
an obnoxious young person to a rueful older person, which is what the book is about, I think
is something I went through in my late 30s, early 40s, right as I was transitioning to this job as
director of the workshop.
So, now I think I’ve forgotten the nature of your question, if you could remind me?
Fassler: I was characterizing the book as forward-looking in a sense, but now that you
mention it, the book is written in three distinct sections, which we’ll talk about in greater detail
later in the program. And it seems like it coincides with your own transition from younger writer,
a literary start-up company, to a more established middle-career writer.
Chang: That’s very funny. I guess it does. I guess that in the middle section, Roman is a little
older than I am, and he’s been teaching for years and years at a small university, an unnamed
school — I don’t know where it is, exactly — in Lincoln, Nebraska. There are many schools in
Lincoln, Nebraska, so this could be any of them. And he doesn’t actually teach in an MFA
program, he’s just undergraduates. And he’s just got his regular job, and he’s questioning the
path his life has taken and wondering, why didn’t I do something more daring or sacrifice
something for my art the way so-and-so does? And I suppose that those thoughts have occurred
to me.
I think that the change that Roman goes through from being a student to being a teacher is
probably more along the lines of what I’ve experienced. As a student, I saw everything from
a student’s point of view. I walked into a classroom, and I actually thought the teacher was a
powerful person. And I actually kicked and squirmed against that power in a way in my mind
and saw them as having no idea that I was doing this. But now that I’m a teacher, I understand
that my teachers were watching me the whole time, and they knew exactly when I hadn’t done
the reading, and when I was like — example: Deborah Eisenberg came to visit our program
a couple of year ago, and she told me a story she remembered from being my teacher in the
classroom. We were reading a Thomas Mann story, and she knew exactly when I had not done
the reading and when I had finished. She could see me reading the story in the classroom as
she was teaching. It was a very funny story she told, and I thought, I totally get it, and she’s
telling me because she knows I get it too, she’s not trying to hurt my feelings.
You see the students, and they don’t know you can see them. They think you’re infallible, and
you feel totally vulnerable. It’s completely different once you become a teacher. And I think in
some ways, that’s what the story is about. When Roman is a young man, he has no idea what
Miranda’s like. Even after he gets to know her better, very well, he really doesn’t understand
her perspective at all. And not until he later becomes a teacher and has experienced ingratitude
does he get that teachers put an enormous amount of themselves into the students and that the
students usually have no clue.
I think that, I can say, comes from some personal experience, but I never meant it to be an
insult, because I remember the way I felt when I was a student as well.
Fassler: So, you’re one of the uniquely privileged people to write about this from both
perspectives you’re talking about here, from the perspective of the student and then from the
perspective of the teacher. And not only the teacher, but administrator, in your case. So, you’re
uniquely privileged to write about this, and uniquely privileged to write about the workshop in
particular, one of the few directors there’s ever been. Was that a challenge at all, to take on
subject matter that is so close to home, especially when you’re a well-known MFA administrator,
even though this doesn’t take place at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?
Chang: Here’s the deal. When I wrote the first 50 pages, I didn’t think this book would ever see
the light of day. I wrote them because I was frankly uninterested in writing, and this was the only
thing that interested me. And it interested me so much, I was so thrilled to be able to enter this
world and make up this story in this little apartment in rural France. And I was so grateful to the
story, but I never thought anyone would read it, and I certainly didn’t think it was a good idea. It
was not a politic thing to do.
And I think I felt the subject matter was both esoteric and unpopular. People feel a lot of
conflict about the idea of writers going to the universities that they go to. There are now I think
230 residence programs that give the MFA degree. And most writers actually do attend MFA
programs and yet nobody really wants to think about it, because they like to think that writing
comes from the sky, or that writing can’t be taught. I think in some ways, my book agrees with
this, and that was another reason that I worried that it would be an ungracious book to write,
because obviously I’d come through very generous programs — this one here at the University
of Iowa, then I went to the Stegner Program in California — where generous people — in my
case, the state of Iowa, the citizens were paying me to teach rhetoric, and believing in my
potential as a writer, and here I was saying, maybe writing can’t be taught, maybe we don’t get
better, maybe craft is not the answer. And I thought, this is not something that people are going
to want to read from me.
And it seems to be the case that that’s true. And yet at the same time, I’m so deeply fond of
the book. It’s my favorite book that I’ve written, and I felt when I was writing it that somebody
was actually giving me a push, that I was writing in this little vehicle that was flying. It was such
a pleasure. I very rarely experience so much actual engagement and pleasure in creating
something. I felt like I knew exactly what the story would be and who the characters were. It was
really fun to write.
And what basically happened was, after two weeks, I put it away for two years. When I took it
again, I had a Guggenheim Fellowship. What happened was, my daughter Tai was born, and
by the time she was two months old, I knew that I would need to come up with some way to
take a leave of absence if I was ever going to write again. And so, I applied for a Guggenheim
Fellowship and started it in 2008. And at that point, I had a couple of projects on deck that I
thought were much more appropriate for someone of my ilk. One of them is about a family in
Iowa. They’re from my first book, Hunger. I’d written a 100-page novella about the mother who
takes driving lessons from this Vietnam veteran and learns to love the United States. And I had
another project about this dysfunctional Chinese-American family.
And I started trying to work on these projects, and I had time. I felt super guilty, because I
knew that Jim McPherson and Connie Ruthers [phonetic] were working to keep the workshop
steady while I was off there writing. And I tried hard for about a month, and I was so bored by
my projects. I can’t describe it. I suppose most people who are writers have experienced this at
some point, where they just try to get into something they know they should be working on, and
they just have no interest whatsoever. They fall asleep constantly when they’re supposed to be
working.
Anyway, a month passed by, and finally my husband said, why don’t you just give yourself a
month to work on the poet project? So I did. And it raced ahead instantly. I was thrilled and
happy, and I wrote large parts of part two. I set up part two, and I guess after that, I would give
myself one more month. The worst time when this happened was when I was actually at a
colony with my family. This colony had given me the opportunity to go there with my daughter
and husband and live in a little house, and they weren’t asking anything from us, not even that
we show up at the dinners, and the whole idea was that I would be getting time to write my
project. So, I was trying to work on these projects that I wasn’t interested in for two out of the
three weeks, and then finally in the last week, I gave in and wrote almost all of the rest of the
book.
Yeah, it was really crazy. It was this example of trying really hard not to write something and
then ending up desperately wanting to write it. So, you know, it was my big, guilty secret, that
I was writing a book, and I was stupid enough to set part one of it in a MFA program. And it
seemed like a bad idea. And on some level, it does turn out to be a bad idea, and on another, it
was the most wonderful experience I’ve had as a writer so far.
Fassler: What do you mean by that, it turns out to be a good idea?
Chang:You know, it seems to me as the book comes out and people begin to read it that the
people who actually read the book like it, and the people who are in a position to comment on it
officially say this is a book about MFA programs and all the questions in the book are about MFA
programs, but they’re not. It’s like, they can’t quite get past the idea that the first part of it is set in
an MFA program, and that I’m the director here at Iowa.
But I was really writing about a world that I’d come to know intimately over a period of 15 years,
that I actually love. I think that’s’ the other problem, that people have mixed feeling about MFA
programs. I actually don’t have mixed feelings, and I think probably that’s why encountering
other people’s feelings about the book is a surprise to me.
Fassler: So, let’s talk just for a minute about Roman and Bernard, the two poets at the
center of the book. How do their attitudes toward their artistic lives differ? Do they represent
archetypes that you’ve come to recognize through your years of working with graduate students?
Chang: Oh my goodness. Well okay, I was giving a reading in New York a couple of weeks ago,
and the young poet who introduced me described Roman as a careerist. I never thought of
Roman as a careerist, because I think Roman is too sour and antisocial to be a careerist, but he
is very ambitious. And the other way in which he could fit this definition is that he looks outside
of himself for recognition and acknowledgement of his accomplishments. So, he’s looking to get
attention, and he gets it from everybody, but he has to do all kinds of things in his school in order
to get attention from his teacher, for example. But ultimately, he doesn’t really believe in himself
until somebody says, this is a good book. And then even when he does win a prize for his first
book, he’s just gnawed by self-doubts.
And I think in contrast to Roman, Bernard’s desire to write is a kind of inner quest that’s almost
spiritual in nature. And he doesn’t send his poems out, he doesn’t care about the world around
him. He leaves graduate schools, moves into another shoebox apartment in Manhattan and
works at a coffeehouse and has no career aspirations. He’s just interested in it because he
loves it.
I don’t know if those represent archetypes of students that I’ve met. Most of the students I know
are mixtures of impulses. Some of them are their own biggest enemies, for example. There is
a character like this in my novel Lucy. She’s extremely talented, but she’s too critical of herself,
and years pass before she gains the confidence to really work.
Fassler: Yeah. One of the things that was really moving for me personally reading the
book is that I am a second year student in the workshop, and I’m facing the life beyond. And one
thing that’s interesting about the book is we get so many histories, even characters who are on
the periphery, of the different things that end up happening to them, and the different fates they
meet.
And there was one passage I thought I would just draw your attention to quickly that resonated
with me. From Roman’s perspective, it says, “And so he began a life fully committed to poetry.
He gave up a secure salary, a finite list of duties in exchange for two years in Bonneville,
Michigan, and following this, no clear path.”
And I think the novel really nails the painful uncertainty of life after the MFA. This must be
something you’ve seen students struggle with over the years.
Chang: I have. What I’ve seen over the years and experienced myself is that the end of second
year for many students, although not all, does feel like a black pit of the unknown. And what I’ve
noticed as a director is that usually in the year or two after the MFA, students negotiate that leap
with admirable agility, and most of the students I know continue to keep writing after they leave.
What stops them can be any number of things. Lucy is an example of this. I actually don’t think
it has anything to do with talent. It has something to do with endurance and stubbornness and
the ability to handle rejection.
And here’s something that is just starting to make sense to me, the ability to say no when other
people need you or want your attention. And that is something that I think most writers have to
negotiate, and especially after they leave the MFA program. They’ve been given two years to
think primarily of themselves as writers, and sometimes they leave and enter a world in which
they have to take other identities.
Fassler: Yeah, and it can lead to morally ambiguous territory, I think, as the characters in
your books suggest.
Chang: Very much.
Fassler: So, I read one critic of the book called it a series of linked novellas. Would you
agree with that characterization?
Chang: I’d not read that. That’s interesting. I don’t think of it that way, but I like the idea. I think
that the first section tells a story, and then the other sections — I guess each of them does. I
haven’t thought about it as a series of linked novellas at all, but I did think of it always as
beginning, middle, and end. And at one point, I think the ending was going to be longer, and
then I realized that it wasn’t necessary, and I could cut out massive amounts of time and just hit
the key points as I was moving forward.
Fassler: One of the things that really fascinated me about the book is that it seems that
the narrator in an interesting way seems to evolve in awareness as the characters do. There are
many moments in the beginning where they’re students, you know, and they’ll do callow, naïve
things, and they’ll say things that are unknowing or superficial, ridiculously naïve. There’s one
moment that I think of, and the narrator will narrate these in a deadpan voice.
Chang: Absolutely.
Fassler: One moment that I especially loved that I thought illustrated this is when Bernard
and Roman are arguing about whether or not Miranda has read his work, and he proves to
Roman, shoving the manuscript in his face, that she must have read it, because there’s one
word written at the bottom margin. And the word isn’t even a word, it’s just, hmm. And so, there’s
something so silly about this, but the characters can’t see the humor, and the narrator doesn’t
remark on it. and yet you as an author must have known how funny this was, and poking fun at
their dramatic seriousness.
Chang: No, not poking fun. I certainly didn’t want the narrator to poke fun. That was the thing, I
wanted the narrator to take the characters seriously, but in order to experience the effect of the
book, I think the reader has to be immersed in their callowness in part one, because it comes
back as poignant. At least, that’s how I’ve experienced. I remember the things, the conversations
we used to have when I was a student here in the workshop, and when I think back, they’re so
poignant to me.
We used to sit around talking about, would you rather be the kind of writer who wrote six or
eight books that were okay, or would you rather write one perfect book? And we would literally
try and answer that question for ourselves. And I think it’s very important that young writers
go through a period of immersing themselves in this idealism in order to move forward. And I
certainly never meant to poke fun, but I did think it was funny, if that makes any sense. And I
think it’s only funny in retrospect.
Fassler: Yeah, well, it seems that things that are given point-blank or at face value in the
earlier stage of the book actually take on this amazing added resonance as the book goes on.
And one example of that is the slogan that Roman keeps taped above his desk. It says, all that
matters is the work. And when you first encounter this, it’s touching because it’s the bravado of a
young man trying to will himself into greatness. And then later when we see it, it’s still at his desk
when he’s an older man, the slogan’s still there, and at that point it means so much more,
because he’s deeply sacrificed for his artistic life in a lot of ways.
Chang: And also in many ways it’s untrue at that point, because he has a wife and a son, and he
probably doesn’t stop to think about it, but they do matter enormously, and he finds out how
much it matters. And then, you know what’s so interesting about that is that I actually had that
taped to my computer when I was young. I don’t remember when it stopped being on there, but
when I was in the workshop, I had it on my computer, and I think I had it there for my first few
years in California. And I also had another sign taped to my door that I looked at every day when
I walked out that said, be brave.
Fassler: Especially as younger writers, we have to have slogans motivate us.
Chang: I tell my class, nobody in class is going to get in trouble for being sentimental, and no
one’s going to be in trouble for being full of themselves, because you have to have a certain
amount of that in order to move forward.
Especially as younger writers, we have to have these slogans motivating.
Fassler: When Allan Gurganus was here last year, he spoke a lot about his favorite 19th
century novelists, and how important it is in his view to read Chekhov and George Elliot and
Henry James, and I think your work has the density of detail and precision of language that I
often associate with 19th century of novels, and also the courage to work with long-term
character growth in a way that some novels don’t. Would you say that your aesthetic is
influenced by 19th century writers?
Chang: That is a very generous comment and I appreciate it. I did have Henry James in mind
when I wrote this, in particular his story “The Beast in the Jungle”, which is just an amazing
piece. I remember the first time I read it actually being absorbed in the waves of language, the
amazing sentences. I could never write those sentences, but the knowledge, the wisdom and
awareness and attitude toward the main character is something that I did take and hold pretty
closely when I was writing this particular book.
Fassler: One thing I love about the book is the way you drop in surprises almost
incidentally. We first learn that Roman has been sleeping with Miranda, which is a hugely critical
detail that happens early on, so I hope I’m not spoiling it.
Chang: I don’t mind.
Fassler: Yeah, but we learn through one offhanded subordinate clause. And yet, it’s really
key. And it seems like there’s several important details in the book that are intentionally withheld
and then revealed later. As a reader, I found this really satisfying. Do you think that withholding
information is key to crafting a compelling plot, at least in this book?
Chang: I’m sure it is. In class, we talk about tension being fueled by questions that the reader is
asking him or herself. And so, a short line of tension might be answered by the end of a chapter,
whereas a long line of tension may take longer for the reader to understand, and both kinds are
necessary in order for the reader to feel both fulfilled and curious as he or she continues.
As far as my own book, this book, it’s strange, because I’ve been in a lot of workshops and sat
in a lot of craft classes and heard a lot of lectures and read a lot of books on craft, but this book
was entirely instinctive. I did not sit down and figure out what people would need to know when.
And the thing I did was put myself in Roman’s head. Roman doesn’t need to tell us a lot of this
stuff unless it matters to what he’s trying to say, and so he reveals it when he’s trying to explain
what he’s going through. He’s a very self-involved character.
The one thing I did wonder about in the book was the placement of the enormous flashback in
part two, that I did wonder whether I should move it out of part two, but I wondered for about two
days, and then I just put it in there because I knew there was really no other way to do it, and
I’m fine with it.
Fassler: Sam, let’s talk a little bit about Bernard. He may be my favorite character in the
book, and he spends his whole life working on a long poem called “All is Forgotten, Nothing is
Lost.” I was really struck by the topic of this poem, which is the 1673 exploration by French
explorers of modern-day Wisconsin. Was this subject at all influenced by your own childhood? I
mean, you grew up in Appleton.
Chang: It was one of the things every Wisconsin child from our part of the state learns in first or
second grade. And Marquette [phonetic] and Joliette [phonetic] paddled in birch-bark canoes,
blah-blah. And I never thought about it when I was a kid, I just sort of swallowed it, but when I
left Wisconsin — which I did as soon as I had the opportunity, I’m afraid — the whole exploration
of that part of the country began to take on a kind of weight in my mind.
And it’s interesting to me, I think that one of the reasons the exploration of Wisconsin was so
interesting to me had something to do with the fact that my family were explorers. My parents
were one of only three Chinese families in our town, and they came out there and made their
own Chinese food, and they tried to improvise tofu out of actual soybeans and failed, and they
were basically frontier persons, and that feeling of being alone in the wilderness — not that it
was a wilderness, but it felt very foreign, I think it’s one of the reasons that I’ve always been so
drawn to books like Little House in the Big Woods, and books that describe the settlers moving
across the continent, and the exploration of the continent. It feels very resonant to me, very
resonant for me, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons I gave that topic to Bernard.
But also because Bernard is Catholic and the explorers were Catholic, and Bernard’s
Catholicism is important to him for his entire life. And I don’t know how it turned out that Bernard
was Catholic, he was always Catholic though.
Fassler: The third section of the book begins with what I see as a fascinating authorial
intrusion, where for the first time, this narrator who’s been very attached to the thoughts mostly
of Romans, but the other characters, breaks free for a moment. And then, this great lyrical
passage tells us about the historical background of this exploration. He or she, meaning the
narrator, even has the ability to pass independent judgment for a brief section, at one point
exclaiming, “How extraordinary a sight it must have been, lush and wild and swollen on the brink
of summer.”
So, I’m wondering about how you approached the narrator in this book, and if you have any
thoughts about why there’s a heightened moment of narration there at the beginning of the third
section?
Chang: I have a lot of thoughts about it, but they’re so boring. They’re long, and they have
something to do with the reading I’ve been doing for the past 10 years or something as I’ve been
writing novels. To summarize, I feel that many novels seek to achieve a sense of verisimilitude,
giving the reader a feeling that what they’re encountering is like human experience in some way.
And yet, we all know that human experience doesn’t really have the shape that a narrative has.
Narratives impose false shapes on experience. It’s interesting to me. In order for the book to be
satisfying, it has to have an ending, et cetera.
Anyway, I was thinking about this, and let me try to say, in order for the book to be satisfying,
it has to have an ending, but the stream of life as we now know it does not shut itself off in that
way. So, that sense of the narrative ending is something that we human beings have created in
order to satisfy ourselves, and that’s interesting to me.
Anyway, the idea I had is that one of the ways in which novels can make a reader feel as if
they’re actually experiencing life is to give the novel some kind of a sense that it’s not entirely
controlled and enclosed in perfect, tight order. And so, at some point in the novel, something
has to break out of the pattern that’s been established and create a sense of leaping, a jump so
that the reader feels that there’s something like reality in it. Reality’s inexplicable to us. There
are many parts of what we’re experiencing that we cannot even begin to understand or grasp,
and it felt to me at one point when I was learning to write novels that it was important. And I
think I internalized that idea and just did it in this book without thinking about it.
As I said, I really did not make very many conscious craft choices in writing the book, and I think
that’s probably another reason I’m so fond of it.
Fassler: So, I love your descriptions of natural world in this book, especially in the
passage we were just talking about. And your husband Robert, to whom you’ve dedicated the
book, is a landscape painter. And I wonder if his artistic eye has influenced you at all, or if that’s
something you talk about with him, physical description, because it’s something I thought was
very painterly in the book.
Chang: You know, I think that it probably has influenced me to talk to Rob so much, but I think
what influenced me more in this case is that Rob forced me to learn to go backpacking and
camping. And so, I’ve become much more intimately acquainted with the north woods in
particular, but with the outdoors in general. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I was
interested in Marquette and Joliette and describing their exploration of Wisconsin. But again, this
didn’t occur to me at all, so it’s very perceptive of you to pick it up.
Fassler: Another art you practice that I’m sure takes a second seat to your writing life, but
you’re a pretty serious knitters, and there’s a cult of knitters in the workshop currently. Is there
any relationship between the writerly temperament and the desire to knit, or is there any aspect
in which weaving things together are interesting to you as a writer, or is it just a habit?
Chang: Let me think. At this point, it’s a way of releasing stress. I started knitting, I suppose, a
year or two after I became director of the workshop and it’s been great. It’s really great. And one
time, I was in the Hambergen, and somebody there who was a practicing Buddhist told me that
it’s also mindful, so I feel like I’m getting more mindful, even though I don’t really know anything
about Buddhism, by knitting.
I don’t know. I had a daughter, she needed clothes, sweaters are ugly and expensive in the
store.
Fassler: So she can wear them? That’s great.
Chang: My grandmother knew how to knit, so I knew how to knit, I just picked it up more
seriously is what happened. And I think that having something to occupy your hands can set
your mind free.
Fassler: Do you have any suggestions for current MFA students looking forward to the
next steps? And maybe your don’t. Your characters in this book make a lot of different types of
choices, but what would you say should be the focus, or the approach?
Chang: Gosh, I think it’s different for everybody. I think at some point, every person has a
reckoning with themselves about what’s most important to them. And also, every person
recognizes that those priorities change with time. And so, I think the only thing you can do is
plan a couple years in advance. You can’t really say from now on, I’m only going to do X, Y, and
Z, because things are going to change on you. And when you’re leaving an MFA program, do
what you think is most important and what you most need at that moment, and trust that the
writing is going to continue.
Fassler: We talked earlier about whether or not art can be taught, or craft can be taught,
or MFA programs can make writers, and it’s certainly a divisive topic. But, some people have
told me, teachers that I’ve had, at least outside of the MFA programs, there’s some angers
towards MFA programs by people who have never attended them.
Chang: Yeah, who are those people?
Fassler: I don’t know, but they’re very active on comment boards on the internet.
Chang: Are they writers?
Fassler:
I don’t know, but don’t you feel that mean-spirited articles about MFA programs
come out from time to time?
Chang: I do.
Fassler: So, I guess in light of that, one thing that professors have told me is that some of
the most valuable things that happen to students in MFA programs is that they meet other
writers, and that’s certainly the advantage of a program like Iowa that’s so large, where you meet
so many people. I was really struck by Bernard’s project in the book to reach out to as many
writers as he could. It’s kind of like Letters From a Young Poet in the book by snail mail, writing
back in correspondence. What do you think is the value of long-term artistic friendships, and is
that an important aspect of the MFA?
Chang: Well, as I get older and continue to try to work, the friendships that I formed with my
classmates here at the workshop and later have become unbelievably sustaining to me,
because most of the world does not have very much interest in the preoccupations of fiction
writing. And so, it’s been really, really comforting and nourishing to have these friends help me
and talk to me and to talk to them, and to watch them live their lives and to live mine.
Long-term, I think it’s been the most emotionally healthy part of my life, aside from my family,
and I’m always very glad that I was able to meet them here. Yeah, I don’t know about — I think
okay, maybe an MFA program isn’t for everybody. I think that’s true, but okay, fine. I don’t see
why people should get upset about it. They should just do what’s best for them.
For me, I think because my parents were not at all supportive of my writing, coming here to Iowa
and finding an entire state that believed in the value of sheltering young writers was a huge
relief and also a source of confidence.
Fassler: We’ve just got a minute or two left, but I thought I’d close by asking you, if you
know, what’s next? Are you picking up any of those projects? The one with the Vietnam vet
sounded interesting.
Chang: I’m still bored by the one with the Vietnam vet. I know that it’s viable, because I know that
the last 25 pages work. So, I just have to sit around until I get what’s wrong with the first 75
pages. I started working on a story this summer about France, and I really enjoyed it, but right
now, because of the book coming out, it’s been too busy to get work done, and when the book is
in the world, I guess I’ll have solitude again.
