Interview by David Ly
In the two years since Lily Wang debuted with her chapbook Everyone in Your Dream is You (Anstruther Press, 2018), she has honed her voice as a poet who poignantly speaks to contemporary culture in her full-length collection Saturn Peach (Gordon Hill Press, 2020).
What follows is an interview between David Ly and Lily Wang about memory, technology, and what it meant for her to draw The Devil card for her 2020 tarot reading.
David Ly: Your chapbook Everyone in your Dreams is You was actually one of the first-ever chapbooks I bought. There was such a control and refinement in your writing back then, and I only saw it stronger here in Saturn Peach. How do you feel your writing has changed between your chapbook and debut full-length?
Lily Wang: Here I am discussing poems I wrote starting at age eighteen. It takes years for a book to come out. Every day I leave myself behind. I had to ask myself what I consider as “growth,” “maturity,” and what is “good writing”? (The past always has something to offer.) My “style” adapts to the different ways I re:present. When my style evolves it is repetition but repetition with difference (I am an earnest liar). Maybe control for me is always part shame. Shame itself is always part hope.
I wrote most of the poems in Saturn Peach while I was reading Auerbach (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature). I wanted my writing to be personal, and embarrassing (in the way only personal poems can be), and still open (open to hope, which no one alone can create). Auerbach blows my mind. When I first heard the idea that everyone in your dream was you, that also blew my mind.
DL: I found that in the poems in your book, the narrators put everyday interactions under a microscope to reflect upon themselves in very nuanced and poignant ways. For instance, the narrator in your short poem “Friend” sees someone pass a window while reading on his phone, at which point the narrator wonders if a “you” received their message. What drew you to certain technologies in our modern-day life as a means to investigate our own behaviours?
LW: Technology is part of my life! I’m a Zoomer! When I think about technology I think about time (which is not linear) and distance (nature- sounds). I text my friend and assume they have their phone on them. I’m in their pocket. In another city, or a different country, but in their pocket! And they can reread my message at any time, any place. They can read me again a year from now, two years … now I’m thinking about forgetting/remembering, hurt/nostalgia. And how intrusive [it is] that someone you haven’t spoken to in years can text you at any time, if they desired, given that you haven’t changed your number. I’m always betting on that chance. Why not?
Technology (toaster, TV, radio, car, technology) appears everywhere in my book and so does nature––everything is everywhere and every day.
DL: “Separat[ing] myself to know myself.” It reminds me of editing our own work: sort of removing yourself from the poem to edit. Being the founding editor at Half a Grapefruit Magazine, how did you find editing your own work different than working on someone else’s?
LW: One time I read this story I didn’t like. I didn’t like the story because it was bad. My professor said many great things about what the story was trying to do, and suggested edits that would help the story do what it was trying to do, better. I didn’t speak all class, aware of how much I still had to learn about being a reader.
I need to be generous with others and myself. Not generous as in easy, as in nice. Generous as in kind, critical, caring.
DL: I found that a Saturn peach is another name for the flat peach. Could you speak a bit as to why your book is titled Saturn Peach?
LW: In the second part of the book, titled “Unsolicited Portraits,” there is a poem called “S.” It asks, if your heart was a fruit, what would it be? This conversation really happens in the back of a car—heart, and I see my dad bent over a bowl eating Saturn peaches, the juice dripping from his wrists. He fills the bowl with peach water, back when we lived in China, still seeing through my five-year-old eyes. I asked him recently, if pan tao (flat peach) was his favourite fruit. He told me he doesn’t like the peaches. He says they’re too sweet, bland. Me too I guess! So am I. My heart is always longing for the people I love and the fruits they love. My heart is this book, fruit pit. What a long way to answer “S.” I’m a weed trying to root in your throat.
DL: The book is divided into five really interesting sections, the first being “RE:”. What was the reasoning for naming the first section like this? Are the poems in it responses to something in particular?
LW: “Re:” (re:ply, re:sponse, re:cognition) (cash re:bate) (joking) introduces the book mid-conversation. I am replying to a friend’s email, who sent me something astounding (“hello” / “thinking of you”). My friends bring me sweets, like sea brine, like peaches. I bring myself gifts too. I bring blunt objects and blunt language. Always responding to the lake, to trees, always part of something. Living, I guess. Alive.
(re:dact, re:fract, re:set, re:member)
DL: I know a lot of writers have certain habits they are accustomed to in order to write; I like to have music on or a movie playing while I write. Is there anything you like to do when writing? Was there anything you found yourself doing a lot of when writing and editing Saturn Peach?
LW: Music is so much a second chance. Music brings me into me(mory). Songs are like helium balloons, filled with rain, bolts of lightning, snow, pollen(!), with long lines of string I can hold onto.
If I need to be sharp, I’ll pop that balloon. I write essays in complete silence. But even this sentence has its own rhythm—we’re always singing to ourselves, in this way, always familiar, reassuring, haunting. Lately I get into writing by journaling: repeating what I already know about my life, to me, launched into the surprise of (having a) voice. Then it’s just talk.
DL: What initially drew me to your book was the cover, and I love to ask authors about their book covers. When I saw the image of this devil-like caricature holding a peach on your book, it was such a moment of temptation. I wanted to know what it could possibly represent. Could you speak a bit about it?
LW: When I spoke to Elijah about the cover, New Year’s had already passed. I got The Devil as my year card, for my 2020 reading (which my friends and I, over hot chocolate and K-pop in the background, interpreted as seduction, temptation, wanting to succumb to darker needs or wants and having to push that away). I also have a tattoo of a little devil. None of these elements are directly related. When we were little my sister would pick flowers to put in our mom’s pockets. I would go up to my mom and fill her pockets with grass, and weeds, and I would laugh and laugh, and my mom would laugh too.
Sometimes when you peek inside flowers you will find giant black ants.
Lily Wang is the founding editor of Half a Grapefruit Magazine. She is doing her MFA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. Her first chapbook Everyone in Your Dream is You was published by Anstruther Press in 2018. Her work has appeared in Peach Mag, The Puritan, The Hart House Review, Bad Nudes, Hobart Pulp, and more.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, The /temz/ Review, carte blanche, PRISM international, and others. He is the Poetry Editor of This Magazine and sits on the Editorial Collective of Anstruther Press.