Questions curated by Kyla Jamieson
Photo credit Ming Kai Leung
Doretta Lau is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? (Nightwood Editions, 2014). The book was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award, longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2014. In 2013, she was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She has written on arts and culture for Artforum International, South China Morning Post, The Wall Street Journal Asia, ArtReview, and LEAP. She completed an MFA in Writing at Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Day One, Event, Grain Magazine, Prairie Fire, Ricepaper, Room Magazine, sub-TERRAIN, and Zen Monster. She splits her time between Vancouver and Hong Kong, where she is at work on a novel and a screenplay. She is a co-founder of the humour and culture website The Unpublishables. She is currently working on a comic workplace novel called We are Underlings and developing projects for film and television. Doretta’s poems, “How to Live” and “Ceremony” appear in our summer issue 56.4.
Website: http://dorettalau.com/
Twitter: @dorettalau
1. Why do you live where you live?
I live in a suburb of Vancouver to be close to family and friends. I’ve always had an amazing community of writers who have supported me through my very worst—I’m so grateful for the kindness and patience of so many people. The rest of the time I’m in Hong Kong. My partner lives there, and my business partner is in the same time zone, and I love being in a place where I can walk around and never attract any attention.
2. What’s your morning routine?
At the moment I don’t have a structured routine, which makes things a bit messy. Right now I’ve been checking Twitter first thing in the morning—this is the worst thing to do because then I read about pipelines, abusive relationships, and all the communities in North America who don’t have access to clean water. I check three blogs: Dlisted, The Balance Beam Situation, and Very Smart Brothas.
When I’m at my most efficient, I meditate, have a green smoothie, do one household task, and then start working. It’s easy to mock late stage capitalist wellness routines, but the thing is that they work if you have access to the necessary resources. I’m trying to get back on a schedule where I wake up at five and get the writing done before life gets in the way.
3. What are you looking forward to this week?
I am so excited to see the Boots Riley movie Sorry to Bother You. It shares a lot of the themes about work and capitalism that I’m exploring in the novel that I’m working on right now called We Are Underlings. Riley had the tenacity to make his amazing vision a reality. Just knowing that someone who shares similar sensibilities to me was able to make this film has really helped propel me forward.
4. What’s happening around you—either right around you or outside of where you are?
There’s been a lot of death and dying, but also a number of births. On the afternoon my dad died, one of my childhood friends welcomed his daughter into the world. We like to imagine that his spirit is with her.
5. What’s the first story or poem you remember writing, and how does it relate to your current work?
I’ve been cleaning out the papers I’ve been keeping at my parents’ house and I’ve found the funniest stuff. There was a title page for a story called “The Ring” with this tagline: “It seemed harmless but within it evil was brewing…” I don’t think I ever wrote that story, but I’m pretty sure it’s because I was reading a lot of Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine then.
In grade ten I wrote a series of poems about something I called the Shadow. Before that I’d never written any good poetry—it was all prose in disguise. On the day we received our assignments back my English teacher, the late great Marlena Morgan, told me to call her phone number. She’d left a voicemail message telling me I’d become a poet, that the work was excellent. I’m getting teary thinking about it. She made me believe that writing was something I was good at, that I had something to say, and this has carried me through decades of failure and success.
6. What’s one risk you’re glad you took?
When I decided to finish writing my short story collection I decided not to take a single freelance project for an entire month so I could focus on fiction. At the time I was living in a 100 square foot apartment in Hong Kong and I had to keep my notes in my lap as I made edits. I had to believe that my writing was worth losing a month of income to pursue. Every morning I woke up at five and worked and ate a lot of McDonald’s because my flat was above a 24-hour location—I didn’t have the ability to balance then and just had be all or nothing to get out of my state of inertia. It took almost an entire month to complete a single story, but it caught the eye of my publisher Silas White at Nightwood Editions, became the title story of my collection, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.
7. Is there any advice you like ignoring?
While I would love to write every day, this isn’t always possible because of work or health issues. So for me if I schedule in two blocks of time each week to devote to writing, I’m happy. If I manage to put more time in I consider that a bonus.
8. What are you most proud of?
I admitted to myself that I had a problem with perfectionism and procrastination and sought help for it. I used to spend hours working on a single sentence—that’s why it took me ten years to write my short story collection. For anyone who is going through this, Dr. Neil Fiore’s book The Now Habit improved my life. I would not be where I am today had I not read his book and implemented changes.
What unlocked writing for me was allowing ugly drafts to happen. My novel is in mess mode right now and I’m just enjoying it. Sometimes I make myself laugh out loud over what I’ve written and this is so much better than the despair and fear I used to feel whenever I sat down to write.
9. Is there a public space you’re fond of? Describe it.
There’s a gravel track that encircles a grass soccer field at one of the high schools I attended. There’s a wooded area next to it, as well as a parking lot and a strip of giant houses. It’s not particularly nice—my shoes always fill up with pebbles when I’m on it—but I like walking there at night while listening to podcasts. (My favourite one is The Black Guy Who Tips.) There’s always a woman in a neon pink windbreaker who walks backward, and another who wears a forest green hoodie and white gloves no matter the temperature who does vigorous arm exercises while strolling. This past winter I found tracks in the snow the size of my snow boot prints. I posted a picture on Instagram, which led to funny arguments about what sort of animal left them. Jennifer Croll sent me a graphic showing the difference between dog and cat prints. Amber Dawn texted dog, wolf, and coyote prints. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so Canadian as when I fielded comments, texts, and emails about this controversy.
10. Do you have any “vices”? What’s the relationship between your vices and your writing?
I quit Diet Coke a few years ago and managed to go an entire year without caffeine, but I’m back to drinking enormous amounts of tea while I’m writing. I usually have three cups in the morning and another one or two in the afternoon. My brain feels sharper, but then I have more trouble sleeping.
I used to drink a lot too and thought if I stopped the work would somehow become bad because there’s this mythology around writers and drinking and greatness. But the thing was I was never able to write if I was drinking—there would just be more whiskey and reading and hours of television and hanging out with friends until two in the morning. I’d go to the bar and go on about the genius of The Fast and the Furious, subject people to out loud recaps of Korean zombie movies, and talk about whatever books I was reading at the time. If the apocalypse hits, my contribution will be that of the inmate in Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman: I’m going to be able to recount all kinds of narratives to make up for the fact that everything else is gone. The one good thing that’s come from this is I’m so well versed in TV that I’ve done the research necessary to write for the medium.
11. What advice would you give a young writer?
If you have decided that this is the life for you, don’t give up. Build a community of people to go with you on your journey. It took me ten years from the time I started grad school to finish my short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? and the path to publication was paved with rejection after rejection. The entire time I had so many generous friends who discussed craft, read drafts, and encouraged me to keep going.
All it takes is for one editor to recognize the spark in your work for your career to change in an instant. You just have to be ready, flexible, and willing to put in the rewriting time.