By Malcolm Culleton
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books and one collection each of short fiction and poetry. He’s a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award. He’s served on boards of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)—and Machete, an imprint of the press of Ohio State University, where he earned his MFA. He’s also the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection, a literary nonprofit organization, and has co-edited two anthologies that examine the fat experience through a literary lens.
Ira is the current Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. He was the keynote speaker and a guest instructor for Chatham University’s 2022 Summer Community of Writers, a ten-day residency for Chatham’s MFA program in creative writing.
On June 19th, the last day of the residency, I sat down with Ira in the cafeteria at Chatham’s Eden Hall Campus. Over the clank and bustle of dishes being cleared in the background, we talked about vulnerability, enabling constraints, and the difference—or lack of it, between genres.
TFR: You mentioned making the final revisions on your recent memoir, This Jade World, here at Eden Hall. You did most of the actual writing in Thailand, though. How does where you write affect what you write?
IS: Right. I wrote the first draft of the book during the trip that it describes, after the divorce. And I think it had to be written in Thailand, because though my ex and I would go to Thailand, and had gotten married in Thailand, our lives together were mostly in America. Everything in America was a reminder of the relationship, so it was harder to write about it here. People say you write the most about home when you’re far from it, right? It was easier to do that in Thailand than it would’ve been in Florida.
TFR: Sure. I noticed a theme of transience—you’ve lived in a lot of places. Upstate New York, Southern Illinois, Chicago, Tampa… and meanwhile, most of your family live on another continent. Was it a conscious decision to explore that serial dislodging of yourself from specific physical places?
IS: For me, the movement of the book is about state of mind. During the divorce and breakup, my mind was a sedentary, static place. So though I did move around a lot, the book really wrestles with a static self. It’s asking: when do we move? How do we move? Is it possible to move in a different direction when you’ve only known one way to do it, one way to be? This question makes me think about how though the book traverses different places, part of its intent is to ask when this narrator will be able to move out of himself and move on in this new stage of life.
TFR: Yeah. You’ve written multiple memoirs: This Jade World, Southside Buddhist, Talk Thai. You’ve also published fiction and poetry. What helps you match content to form? Why do you keep circling back to memoir?
IS: I call creative nonfiction the Gateway Genre—even though I don’t believe in genre. I started as a fiction writer, but I wasn’t really good at it. Then I took a nonfiction course, and that opened the world to me. I started thinking about my life and the world differently because I had to evaluate questions I’d never asked myself. I was like eighteen, nineteen years old, and in fiction was writing about stuff I didn’t know anything about.
TFR: Sounds like what I did in college!
IS: Right? You just make stuff up and feel like that’s how it should be. Meanwhile, you don’t really know what revenge is, or what heartbreak is, or what suffering is. You either haven’t really confronted those things, or didn’t have the language or mental capacity to really look at them. Nonfiction made me look at language, not just at story. All good writers know that language is vitally important—more so than content itself, honestly. And poetry is an intense examination of language—it’s about pacing, rhythm, mood. But it’s also about shape, which for me as a writer is so important. It tells us so much about what a writer is doing. In my poetry, I’m always trying to get the language of a situation down. I try to avoid story in my poems; I just want to get the musicality of that moment. Or the antimusic, perhaps. I want the reader to leave a poem with a sensation. rather than a pure meaning.
Also, in nonfiction the pronoun “I” is a pronoun of responsibility. I was often asked why my first book, Talk Thai, wasn’t written as a novel—and I said because I wanted to tell about my family, about things that ailed me during my childhood. Not a surrogate child or a stand-in. There’s responsibility in claiming your own story.
In fiction, though, I don’t want responsibility. I often write fiction at my darkest moments. For instance, when the marriage wasn’t going well, I wrote fiction. Because I wanted to put what I was feeling, right now, onto my characters, without having to save them.
TFR: Now that you’ve claimed that responsibility in nonfiction, do you feel that you have a better grasp of fiction as well? Is it easier to see the entire landscape of what fiction can be?
IS: Yes, absolutely. I love creative nonfiction for its amoebic nature—it can do anything you want it to. You can tell a traditional story or be completely fragmented, utilize all these different types of forms. It moves just like poetry. There’s a freedom of decision, choice, and intent.
For a long time, I thought fiction was a completely different animal. But no, it isn’t—it can operate the same way that poetry or nonfiction does. We’re simply dealing with what the characters in fiction know versus what they don’t. In nonfiction, readers witness a character who’s flawed, but who knows they’re flawed. And the book is usually them trying to figure out why they’re flawed. In fiction, sometimes we’re dealing with a character who really doesn’t know that they’re flawed. And that’s the journey.
TFR: We have dramatic irony.
IS: We do! And that’s a different type of engagement. What you’re really talking about is narrative distance and authorial control. There’s a lot of authorial control in nonfiction. In fact, there’s an expectation of authorial control. The author’s expected to come in and say something to guide readers towards subverting our expectations or thinking deeper about a topic. In fiction, though, sometimes all the author needs to do is be present and let the characters do the work for them. I love that dynamic. I see it as one of the only differences between genres, actually.
But I’ve been surprised, too. I’ve seen fiction take the shape of essays. I’ve seen memoirs take the shape of fiction, or feature a first-person voice that doesn’t have all the answers and reads like a flawed character, the way fiction does. These lines are really interesting for me. Part of what keeps me going now, as a writer, is looking at where boundaries have been set and seeing how we can push them, obliterate them, or change them. Looking at mergers in the art of words, not separations.
TFR: That reminds me of how often you’ve mentioned enjoying writing to constraints, and using writing prompts as a teacher. Could you give a few examples of prompts that you’ve found surprisingly generative or useful?
IS: One thing I’ve been talking about in my classes is not planning too much. Allowing the subconscious to do some of the work. For example, today I told my students “Alright, for two minutes, write about weather.” Not a particular type of weather, just weather. Then after two minutes I asked them to stop and write about a particular time in childhood. Childhood is broad, right? But just write the first moment you think of. Then the third thing I ask them to write was someone else’s story—a bit of folklore, a fairy tale, a book you’ve read, a family story told over and over to you. Then we repeated the sequence, but this time did each braid in one minute. There’s no time to think—you have to do do do.
A lot of times, what emerges is something unexpected. As soon as I say “weather”, the brain is already creating a story based on that word. Then when I say “childhood”, the brain is immediately creating a narrative—maybe it’s even cross-associating with what it was just doing, weather. And then when I say “tell someone else’s story”, the brain is already connecting—because that’s what the brain’s always trying to do. It wants to find patterns, to find meaning, to connect. Though I believe in fragmentation, really fragmentation is still another type of storytelling. We take fragments like our memories and try to make meaning of them. That’s how we understand things in life.
A constraint I’ve used is to have students write a piece that employs just one sentence in the density of a paragraph. Or write one sentence for one page. See how they can control language, or rhythm. When are those commas put in? How do you control pace? How do you quicken a long-ass sentence, or slow it down?
Sometimes we go into story with an attitude of “I wanna tell the story of that one time,” or “I wanna tell the story of this.” But now I have to concentrate on language decisions; the story is secondary to what I have. It’s like how one of my favorite poetry forms is the sestina, because there’s responsibility in it. It has six stanzas and has to end with a certain sequence of words. You can never get ahead of yourself, you can only write to that particular word before you think of the next line. We’re often surprised when we rewire our brain to think primarily about the language of the story. To me there’s urgency, there’s more at stake, in a weird way, about that. There are more places for surprise.
TFR: It’s like you’re writing to experiment on your own brain. Dropping the rat into a different maze, every time.
Absolutely. And it’s fun! That’s the other thing that’s important. How do you sustain joy in writing? How do you keep it going for a lifetime? Prompts and silly exercises are ways to keep it fresh.
TFR: On that note—in addition to being a writer and a teacher, you’re also an editor. What are some exciting trends you see emerging across the literary landscape? What’s something new that keeps refreshing your interest?
One thing I notice is how a lot of writers are trying out different structures and looking at how structure mirrors our culture. The other thing I really love is the daring to say things that are hard. Politically, culturally, we’re surrounded by so many things that are wrong, but we’re often silent about them. So when I read something that isn’t silent, that’s loud about what’s happening, it’s thrilling. Here’s someone who’s unafraid to take a risk.
A thing that I’d like to see more of, and that brings me a lot of joy when I do see it, is writers who are unafraid to be vulnerable. In general, I don’t think we ever wanna be weak; I don’t think our culture allows for weakness or vulnerability. So we no longer want to talk to each other, we want to talk at each other. Our culture doesn’t want to dialogue. Vulnerability, though, is about dialogue. When you read someone vulnerable, you enter into a conversation. When I read really great books, like Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, I’m thinking… “Wow. That is exposing something that’s beautifully tragic, but also something I know.” So I wrote to Kiese and said “Oh my God, you just said something I’ve been wanting to say but haven’t been able to. Thank you for saying it.”
Vulnerability is a place to connect, empathize, understand, and see the other side. In my nonfiction courses especially, I notice a lot of pieces of students’ writing that are protecting themselves. Or wanting to sound like someone they’re not. When we become overly intellectual or overly lyrical, those are defense mechanisms that go up to prevent us from getting into what we really need to get into.
TFR: Yeah… I know I’m guilty of that, all the time. Every first draft!
IS: Me too! I’ll be overly lyrical, concentrate so much on musicality and sound. Suddenly I realize I’ve been stuck on this one page for days, or weeks. It’s like, “wow, what don’t you wanna say? What are you afraid of?” Part of writing is identifying those defense mechanisms we use.
So that’s something I look for right now. Vulnerability. Or, something I can tell that the writer got a lot of joy from writing. I’ll think “Oh man, that passage is great! I can see a writer being really happy about that!”
TFR: Vulnerability and joy, connected.
IS: Absolutely.
Malcolm Culleton is a writer of nonfiction and fiction and a current MFA student at Chatham University. His work has been published in 101 Words and the Roadrunner Review and has been nominated for an AWP Intro to Journals prize. He lives in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania.