Interview by David Ly
Tess Liem’s debut full-length collection Obits. (Coach House Books) seeks to find a place where those who are othered can mourn and find themselves. It’s a vulnerable collection, one with layers so intimate to the process of mourning as a mixed-race queer woman.
What follows is an interview between David Ly and Tess about writing, intent, and storytelling.
David Ly: Thanks for agreeing to chat, Tess! Before we begin, I’d just like to first congratulate you on the success of Obits. and it winning the 2019 Gerald Lambert Memorial Award. It’s wonderful that your book is getting the recognition it deserves. While writing it (or upon finishing), was there anything you hoped for Obits. to achieve?
Tess Liem: While I was writing Obits., I wouldn’t have been able to admit any goals beyond passing my thesis. I just hoped that the ideas were legible outside of my brain. Once it was accepted and the reality that more people than a workshop or thesis committee would read these poems all together started to set in, I hoped it would make it into the hands of someone who it would resonate with, that it would move someone, or make someone feel seen. Of course I wanted people to think the poetry and its formal qualities were interesting, too. Award lists and even the tender, smart reviews I’ve received have exceeded my expectations for Obits. It’s a privilege to be on any bookshelf and I feel lucky that something I wrote has been accepted into the world—once in a while I glance at my author copy, which is spine in on one of my bookshelves, and I’m still surprised, like wow! I did that.
DL: You certainly did! I think you’ve done a fantastic job at writing a collection that, like you hoped for, resonates with someone and makes them feel seen. For me, it’s really wonderful seeing poems in this book where the narrators work through their identities of being queer and Asian. Thank you for writing! Could speak a bit about how you view the state of representation of marginalized writers in CanLit?
TL: Thanks for saying that! This feels like such a huge question, not to mention the possibility that there is no CanLit, but instead, a plural: Lits. Unfortunately, there isn’t currently (as far as I know) any organization within Canada doing any kind of survey that could begin to answer this (like VIDA does, or CWILA used to). It’s challenging and complicated work to collect data, but I think without it the state of representation is hard to capture. Like many other readers, I have sought out books that feel representative of not only of my experiences, but of many different ones. Representation feels diverse on my own shelves, but I think there’s a long way to go in general. Beyond counting, the use and prevalence of terms like “marginalized writers,” “diverse authors,” and “inclusion” by institutions, publishers, festivals, etc. points to the fact that many writers are indeed still marginalized, still othered, still excluded and that inclusion of such writers still need be marked by these terms. However, I don’t want to discount the positive impact of seeing marginalized writers succeed and seeing so many people holding each other up, making each other feel seen. It feels like we are our own best audience and for that I’m grateful.
DL: I love that: “making each other feel seen.” I also agree that there is a long way to go. But books like yours help! Which brings me to my next question about your book. What I find you do so well in it is storytelling. With poetry, what do you think it can do in terms of telling a story that you don’t find prose can achieve?
TL: The first thing I thought was that it’s just the difference between saying “and then…” or “and this…” to imply that poetry may be less concerned with organizing things in linear time than prose; maybe poetry is more concerned with pointing one’s attention to moments, and accumulations or inventories, but I don’t think that’s fair to prose. I’ve actually been trying to revive my short story writing lately, and when I was asking my friend for advice about craft books, we actually came to the conclusion that I was not a very good story teller, but that that was OK. This also reminds me that my first workshop was for fiction and I had a habit of editing my stories by cutting out most of what I’d written initially, and breaking the lines until they were poems. So maybe it is that poems leave space, literally and figuratively, for stories to happen in a different way, maybe by mood rather than action. I’m sorry, I’m being a bit wishy-washy because I’m interested in cross-genre work that might play with this question rather than answer it with any certainty.
DL: Not at all! That’s a perfectly good answer. I still think you’re a pretty good storyteller through poetry, and you’ve managed to weave great stories about mourning and loss throughout your book. In one of your poems, you write that Euripides tells about Hecuba turning into a dog because her grief was too much for a human to bear. Through poems that revolve around obituaries, memorials, and memory, how were you able to explore the effects of grief on the experience of being human?
TL: That page of the book is directly indebted to Anne Carson’s NOX, which is to say that her book first brought my attention to the story. It stayed with me in relation to my own project because it is a story about how grief is transformational. But more so, there is this other layer: the act of telling the story. That Euripides told the story is important too. Telling a story makes grief—something that can feel impossible to express truly in language—legible. By putting it into the structure of a story, we can literally read her grief and then we probably project all sorts of meanings and theories onto it. An experience that is uncontainable is somehow contained and then interpreted. There’s something counterintuitive about this, which maybe can be summed up in how I’ve been describing the book lately as a place where wanting to live and wanting to die intersect. There is also the aspect of obituaries and memorials being things that exist in regulated spaces (like newspapers, on monuments, in books, etc.) but that’s a bit of a tangent that has to do with who is granted the authority to make someone’s grief legible.
DL: Fantastic. I love the notion of how telling a story can make grief more legible. That poem has to be one of my favourites in your book. Another favourite of mine is “My body in three movements (two)” where the speaker writes about wanting to start a queer construction company. It’s unexpectedly funny, especially the end! How did this piece come about and why did you feel it should go in this collection?
TL: I signed up for a Shakespeare course and to prepare for it I read all of the sonnets and then I read them again once the course started, and then I dropped it. So, predictably, some complaints poured out of me. Of course mine are not in iambic pentameter, but each of the body movement poems (except the coda) are fourteen lines, and each line is ten syllables so they are my basic af sonnets. They felt necessary for the book because there is a link between what/how we read and how we mourn or, as you suggested, how we understand our experience of being human. The methodologies and practices involved in close reading, analyzing and applying theory to literature are deeply intertwined with how we treat people, how we see ourselves (or don’t!), how real people can become metaphors stripped of their humanity, how empathy is developed in and outside the English department, etc. Broadly speaking it was important to me to make the connection between the study of literature and lived experiences. I was also expressing a genuine desire—I want someone to teach me how to build a house!
DL: That’s awesome. What was the toughest thing about writing this book?
TL: I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but no part of writing this book wasn’t tough for me. Ultimately, getting a first draft done is always the hardest for me. Of course this involved all kinds of technical questions, so to speak, about how to incorporate research, figuring out structure, asking myself if I was writing through these subjects ethically, but really just getting those first sixty pages together into a document that I felt I could share with anyone felt like it might never happen. I’m always questioning myself, wondering why something needs to be a poem by me. There’s a talk posted online about “The Art of Revision” and C.D. Wright’s opening remarks describe this feeling for me exactly. She said, “it takes me so long to formulate a thought worthy of articulation and it takes me so long to articulate my opinions in a form worthy to call thought.” Same!
DL: Thanks so much for chatting with me, Tess. I have one more question. I love the cover for Obits. I feel like not enough interviews cover (hehe) a book’s look. Could you speak a little bit about how the cover of your book is representative of the poems inside?
TL: Likewise, thanks so much for your questions. All compliments for the cover to Crystal Sikma, who put it together based on my very vague requests and total lack of graphic design sense. Originally I had wanted a close up photo of the yellow caution line, the edge of the metro platform. I wanted that because having a bright colour and texture felt important. Yellow because, for me, that was a colour woven throughout the book and because I wanted my little death book to look bright. And then the texture of the caution line saying stop here was something I wanted to emphasize visually. But that photo never worked out so Crystal offered me this beautiful textile in its place and that was that.
———
Tess Liem is a queer writer living in Montreal, Tiotia:ke—unceded Haudenosaunee and Mohawk territories. Her writing has appeared in Plenitude, Room Magazine, PRISM, Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2019, the Montreal Review of Books and elsewhere. Her essay “Rice Cracker” won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2015. Her debut collection Obits. was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry in 2019, as well as long listed for the Pat Lowther Award. The book recently won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for 2019.
David Ly is the author of Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018) and Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020). His poetry has also appeared in publications such as PRISM international, carte blanche, Pulp Literature, The Maynard, and The /tƐmz/ Review. He has been long- and short-listed for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Magpie Award in Poetry, respectively. Twitter @dlylyly.