The Work Room Interview: Alexander Chee Talks Literary Influences, Upcoming Projects, and Abandoned Spaceships

Interview by Kate Mabus

The Work Room: You've published three books, which have some thematic similarities but are very different genres. Not many writers have produced both a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction essay collection. How do you decide what to write?

Alexander Chee: From the beginning of my writing career I was writing both fiction and nonfiction. As a student, I was studying fiction and nonfiction, the literary essay with Annie Dillard and fiction writing with Kit Reed. Even when I was a graduate student at Iowa, I talked my way into Clark Blaise’s nonfiction workshop, an interesting trick, because I hadn't applied to the nonfiction program. And I spent so much time with poets, even participating in slams, there’s people who think I went to Iowa for poetry. And I remember, it felt strange to be thought of as a fiction student only.  Especially because people acted as if these were ethnicities and not genres.  

Much of my teaching as a result is derived from what I’ve learned by moving back and forth between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. So there is some way that it just seems really normal to me. 

As for how I decide, I'm just always on the lookout for questions that don't have immediate answers. A recent essay that I started comes from me watching  a science fiction show on television—Andor--and thinking to myself: ‘Oh, I will really just watch anything that has an abandoned spaceship in it.’ Then I asked myself, ‘Why? Why am I like that? What am I after?’ There’s something about not just the idea of the future, but the idea that the future has its own ghosts, but even that's not really the answer, and that's the part that pulls me in. What is the answer there? The answer I’m chasing isn't a novel about abandoned spaceships just yet, but maybe that’s where this goes. Maybe that's the ground the essay is preparing.

WR: The early sections of Edinburgh, your first novel, were written on the subway back and forth from your job at the time. How has your writing process changed throughout the years?

AC: For whatever reason I really need to feel, when I'm writing, that no one can find me. And maybe that's why I've moved to a small town in eastern Vermont where there's not even a stoplight or bar, with a writing cabin behind my house. I suppose theoretically, someone could find me if they wanted to, but it doesn't feel like it when I'm in the cabin. I think those kinds of spaces, spaces where I can hide or spaces where I'm relatively anonymous–like when I was on that subway, for example, it felt like I was just a person on a subway like anybody else–that feels like a portal to whatever place the fiction lives in. 

But increasingly, I also just write anywhere. My friends who are writers and mothers taught me that—to make it less precious, to do it in any of the tiny increments of time you can find.

WR: The Queen of the Night, your second novel took nearly 15 years of research. This work was heavy on history, but research is key to all types of writing. What is the role of research in your projects?

AC: That wasn’t all research. But research is the bedrock of the dream, if you’re writing fiction. If you’re writing nonfiction, it’s almost the whole act. 

There was an exercise that Annie Dillard had us do as students. She asked us to research our hometowns. The reason she gave at the time was approximately, You will write about your hometown most likely and you believe you know the place you grew up in, but what do you really know about it? Do you know the year it was founded? Do you know who first settled the area? Do you know what the major industries are? She ran down a checklist of the things that you would want to know if you were going to write about a place and sent us off to look it up, and that alone made a big impression on me. The idea of how I could be from somewhere, so sure that I knew it, and it was just time spent there in a more or less incurious state about how that place came to be, which is how a lot of us grow up in a town. 

But the results made an even bigger impression. Doing the research answered all of these questions I didn't even remember having about the place I grew up in. There were all of these abandoned naval bases in the area, for example, empty towers and townhouses. The beaches were full of sea glass that I learned came from when they decommissioned the naval bases and the officers’ plates and glasses were just thrown into the ocean. This kind of immense, strange leave-taking had left behind what felt like a series of ruins we all just lived with as if it were normal. The fire department practiced on those townhouses by burning the surviving homes on the naval base, one every year for a while. This just seems like a huge waste, but that's what they were doing, and that's how they justified it. That relationship between the town and the ruin and the Navy, there's something in all that that is probably also related to my abandoned spaceships obsession, now that I think about it. 

Research also solves for the student who claims they don’t have anything to write about. I take the hometown exercise farther, you could say--I've had my students fact-check family stories of immigration, a fascinating exercise. One young woman found her grandmother's immigration paperwork from when she fled the Holocaust and the US wasn't accepting Jewish refugees at the time. She went to Haiti first and then eventually to New Jersey. And the student didn't think she could find that, and her grandmother didn't think she could find that either, but the paperwork allowed the grandmother to repatriate to Germany before she died, something that meant a great deal to her. That’s a huge thing to get out of doing an essay for your class, and to be able to give back to your grandmother. 

WR: In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, you write about your time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and resisting anticipated pressure to conform to Raymond Carver minimalism. How did you find your writing style?

AC: Right, that pressure that never materialized, as I observed in the essay. It's one of the most common cliches about Iowa. But truly, no one will try to make you write like Carver.

I think we find our style through our favorite things that we read or through the ways we do and don't accommodate the pressures on us to either belong or to not belong to a community, a family, a social class. So much of what we call style is a struggle with all of these different factors and those are just a few. 

I remember as a student thinking about how there was a certain way in which I felt like the facts of my existence as a gay Korean American were too complicated for the minimalist American style of writing. And then I found Mavis Gallant. And she had characters who were the product of a variety of cultural backgrounds, wars, religions and marriages. I found Gregor von Rezzori, who was much the same. It was completely ordinary in their writing to mention that you were Austrian and Italian and all of these different kinds of European backgrounds. And I saw how the way I had been made to feel complicated in a different light. I found myself more ordinary as a result, instead of uncanny, and then it was easier to write the stories that I wanted to write about. Because I’d always been made to feel when I was growing up that there was something strange about my background and my family.  

I interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin in 2008, and she had a very interesting take on influences in writing. She said, you know, most writers, when you ask them who their influences are, they mention who they hope influenced them. It's aspirational. The real influence happens before you know you're being influenced. It was then I realized, she was one of those influences. Tombs of Atuan and The Queen of the Night are like strange cousins.

WR: You once described your essay collection as an investigation of various mis-identifications you've received. Can you talk a bit about the relationship you see between writing and the complex thing that is identity?

AC: I almost never think, ‘Now I will write about identity.’ I just have questions like, ‘Why am I like this? Where does that come from?’ And I think we call it identity in the US because it seems like that's one step removed from saying that you're writing about yourself. As if maybe, you know, you're writing about something that was a little external to yourself instead of somehow intrinsic. And I think we do this because there's a way we are asked when we become American to engage in a kind of an erasure of our past or an erasure of our connection to our past in order to adopt the American way of doing things. It feels very antiquated now to remember assimilation but this was a product of that. So, when I talk about knowing even just who my great-grandparents are, there's people I have as colleagues who don't know that, students who don't know that. That's part of why I wanted to have them try to write about those histories, to recuperate that.

One student found her great grandfather's actual name, his legal name, which had been lost to the family. She learned also that as a Japanese-Hawaiian American, her family had not been swept up into the camps because they were too poor. They were worth more as labor to the state. They didn’t have anything to steal, no land to steal. And so, when you write that way, you learn about your family and the country both at the same time. You learn about where they meet, as it were, and how that meeting happens, and how perhaps the great-grandfather losing his name could have been an act of erasure by the state, or even his own attempt to hide himself; it could have been alienation from even the idea of the record of an identity at a time when having an identity like that was dangerous. 

Calling that ‘writing about identity’ seems to me like keeping history a little bit at arm's length. And I have a hunch that there's an anxiety that comes with not having those answers in your life, a sort of off kilter feeling, because what you've really done is you’ve orphaned yourself, in a sense, to your ancestors, for the sake of some new blank identity that will not protect you, but that is in fact about the state's protection of itself.

WR: Last year, you edited the annual Best American Essays anthology, which you are teaching from in an upcoming craft seminar. What draws you to the form?

AC: Even after reading all the essays for the collection I still love reading essays.  I was reading about five a day that year. At least. So that's 365 days, about 1825 essays. The class is about the lessons I took from putting the book together.   

As a young person, it felt like freedom to encounter the essay form, even as so much of the writing of an essay is about a struggle with your own moral code. And by that I mean the way we organize the world and ourselves in relationship to the world—what you think matters, what you think doesn't matter. So often, the writing of an essay is about confronting some aspect of that and changing it or destroying it or surrendering some part of yourself that you thought was being true to this code, and then realizing the code must change. I am always interested in the person I’ll be by the end of the essay. 

WR: You’ve taught at 11 colleges and universities over the years and also done several classes for The Work Room. What has teaching taught you about writing?

AC: Teaching always teaches you what you know, which is to say you may not even be aware that you have answers to a particular question until someone asks the question. And you may also not be aware that you don't have answers to a particular question until someone asks the question. 

Probably the biggest lesson of teaching writing, though, is quite simple. I say this in the essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: you cannot write a story that you do not want to write. If you don't have some visceral connection to it, or some intellectual curiosity that is like an appetite for the idea that either of those, or maybe both, you won't see the writing through. I think sometimes with creative writing instruction there's a tendency to act as if, if you just come at a piece of writing with an array of craft instructions, and you can turn something from this into this and go out into the world with it and so on. It just doesn't work that way. In some ways part of what I teach students is how to care about what they care about, by writing about it.

WR: What's next for you? And are there any upcoming projects you can tell us about?

AC: I am working on another essay collection, at least two novels, and an episode of television, which I can’t say more about, but I can say that I'm excited to be working in this very different way. I’ve never written for television before like this. But taking a screenwriting class a few years ago resulted in me writing my favorite short story so far in my career, so I guess we’ll see.