There is such a deep vulnerability held within the pages of Vi Khi Nao’s most recent work, “War Is Not My Mother” (CLASH Books, 2023). Processing, coping with, and carrying the weight of illness, she weaves darkness and pain beautifully through a landscape of war, yielding a masterful, cohesive song that carries emotional weight and inspiration, showing the raw honesty of a vulnerable space and a truth about when fear and uncertainty invade —whether in the body or in war— and what is left in the wake. How do we capture pain and grief, and process the stages of it, and persevere through it?
Described as a series of poetic remixes, Nao communes with poets like Sappho, Lorca, Ishrat Afreen, and in a form of spirit possession, takes their works and infuses her lines with their form. With cleverly sharp wordplay and metaphorical magic, the collection is dark and beautiful and comforting and unsettling; it is painful and powerful, and so visual, with remnants of magic realism and postmodernism. In this collection, Nao builds a structural space for all of these themes to collide in the most beautifully authentic way.
It was a great honor to speak with and interview Vi Khi Nao.
LMH: How did this collection begin? Tell us how it all came together.
VKN: I wrote it when I was in Iowa City in 2018. I was teaching a poetry course and trying to think of prompts for my students, so I came up with an emulation prompt. I have a lot of writers who have writer’s block and sometimes they feel uninspired and don’t know what to write next, so sometimes I will get them a form—like a box or container— and the form can be a container in which they can just dump anything they want, but it has to fit within that box. It was really effective for my students. I actually test drove the prompt just to see how it worked for them —and then I found that it was incredibly successful for me. I wrote it when my health in 2018 was on the verge of declining. I needed open heart surgery, which I was evading. I was terrified, but while I was in that state of terror and realizing that my life was really short and that my heart wasn’t going to do so well, I wrote this manuscript in three months. I did at least one [piece] a day and I just kept on writing. Some of the prompts were like if a poet wrote a poem where I love the form of it, but don’t especially like the content; I can always try it with my own work —or if it’s someone that I admire and their work is so awesome, I was wondering what their secret recipe is; what makes this poem so great? So I would use the structure inherent in the form —the poetic form of their work— and make it inclusive to mine.
LMH: Does it feel like being in dialogue with some of the poets whose work you love? Do you look for a sense of connection or community with an existing piece of work?
VKN: It’s like a conversation that I have with myself more than with other writers. Although I’m in conversation with them and their work, I’m (more) in conversation with the form and some part of the content. At the heart of it is discourse with myself —like how do I become a better writer? Is it starting with emulation of form? Is it an emulation of structure? What is it? It’s also how to refresh someone’s memory of an experience. Poetic form is a type of memory —a very contained memory— manifested into this entity that gets to exist a little longer on earth through that self-contained container.
LMH: Thinking a little about the process, how does this work and its process compare to some of your other previous works and their process?
VKN: Each one of my books is different. I try a new thing with every single book, so none of them are the same, and all of them are very different in different ways. I want to continue to grow because growing is a large part of happiness. I don’t think happiness is like having paradise and just being there eternally [in one place]. Paradise is the ability to move through time, growing in its different transient states. If I create a new book and the form is completely different than it’s ever been before, I feel like I’m growing exponentially as a writer, and I think my happiness is driven by that. This book is an embodiment of my state of dissension into bad health, but also in retrospect, I was growing because of it. I was producing poems that I would never produce– styles that I’d never tried before. Writing a book is a documentation of how long you’ve lived, how far you’ve gone in your literary career, where you are at in life. It’s a timestamp of my existence. I hope people get to enjoy some of the playfulness, the wildness, the poetic discourse that I launched my dark soul into.
LMH: Can you talk a little bit about language? How do you process language? How does language process or translate in your work for you?
VKN: I play around with words a lot —sometimes in the form of poetry, and sometimes it’s in fiction, sometimes it’s in playwriting. I just love language and occupying it, and being with it, and finding a home for my memory in it. I have a lot of houses, a lot of castles, a lot of vans and a few hotels here and there that come in. I have a lot of structures out there in the world— material, structured in the form of language. My relationship with language is constantly transient, I think.
LMH: What is your creative space? Where do you usually do your work?
VKN: Just everywhere. Whenever I have a place to create work, I do it. Anywhere. In a car at Target, in a moving van, flying, taking a boat trip; anywhere.
LMH: How do you nourish your creative side when you aren’t working?
VKN: I eat a lot of fruits. I love guavas and mangoes and rambutans.
LMH: What has been the most helpful advice or insight you’ve received- or, what’s your favorite piece of advice to give to your students?
VKN: The advice I give my students is that sometimes in the busy schedule, it’s hard to carve out a time to write, so they have to see language like a saving account, in which every day, if they insert a quarter —which is like just a sentence— and insert enough over 365 days, then that quarter becomes more through the little cumulative impact of it; and when they need to, they can break open an account and have all these words and languages that they have stashed away for a while and they can build a new poetry collection with.
LMH:Are you currently working on any projects? What’s next for you?
VKN:I’m doing a translation with Lily Hoang. She and I are working on translating this manuscript that we wrote together into Vietnamese. It takes a long time to translate. It’s a very slow process and there’s some difficult sentences that we have to navigate. It’s a collection of short stories. We wrote a bunch of short stories together —some of them having to do with robots and other stuff. It’s a range of stories and we had a lot of fun writing it.
VI KHI NAO is the author of seven poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is out of 11:11 in Spring 2023. The Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the 2022 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.