Writer Mother Monster: Lan Samantha Chang, “A lot of my younger students write stories about middle-aged characters who are angsty and bored, and I’m thinking, ‘No, that’s not what it’s been like for me.’ It’s been one crazy thing after another!”

(May 13, 2021) Lan Samantha Chang, Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of Hunger; Inheritance; All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost; and The Family Chao (W.W. Norton, 2022). She has a 13-year-old daughter and describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as “Need more time.” In this episode, Sam talks about growing up one of the only Chinese kids in Wisconsin, offers advice for applying to residencies, and explains her method for writing while raising a family and holding down a demanding career. And, she talks about a real dog in an imaginary book.

Writer Mother Monster is an interactive interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.

Transcript

Lan Samantha Chang

May 13, 2021

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Lan Samantha Chang. Sam’s new novel, The Family Chao, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2022. She is the author of two previous novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lostand Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Sam is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives with her husband and her 13-year-old daughter in Iowa City, Iowa. She describes writer motherhood as "need more time." Now, please join me in welcoming Sam. Hello.

Lan Samantha Chang

Hi.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to see you. Let’s start with those three words you use to describe writer motherhood: “need more time.” Tell me a bit about that.

Lan Samantha Chang

You know, I spent a while trying to come up with three words. It’s not the easiest thing to do. I felt like I could write 1,000 words about it or just straight declarations, like “I’m through,” “This is too much.” “‘Need more time’ was what I what I came up with because, honestly, I reached a point this spring semester, where I realized that for the last few weeks, everything I do that I want to do, that isn’t part of what I’m supposed to do, is cutting into something I’m supposed to do. I just don’t have any time to do anything except what I’m supposed to be doing, which is not great for writers, not great. I haven’t actually had a chance to write for a couple of weeks.

Lara Ehrlich

I know you wanted to talk about how you actually figured out how to write a novel in the midst of all the things you’re doing. But before we get there, let’s talk about some of the things that you need to be doing. What do you need to do in your daily life?

Lan Samantha Chang

Well, I have a delightful 13-year-old daughter who’s been in the house with me since the middle of March 2020, and my husband is a teacher and spends a few days a week outside of the house. It’s basically me and Ty, my daughter, and she’s just really lovely and really not a difficult child, but it’s just different trying to get things done when someone else is in the house.

Also, I think if I were alone, I would not be cooking. I’ve been doing a lot more food preparation in the last year than I usually do during the day. When my husband’s home, he does it, so he’s great. Then there’s talking to my husband when he is around, and I also have a day job, which has turned out to be really, really time consuming during the pandemic in unexpected ways. 

I am responsible for a graduate program where there are more than 90 poets and fiction writers, almost all of whom have given up locations in some other place to come here, which is great. In a usual year, they come and they meet each other, but in the last year, they’ve been giving up their life to come here and take classes online, which is complex. The university requires that they be here, but the classes are online. We’ve been rolling out a whole set of activities that don’t involve being person-to-person. I will say the students have been really lovely and have come up with a ton of outdoor events for themselves. But I do feel responsible for them. I feel like they came out here because of our program, and I have to come up with something for them to do. 

On top of that, there’s teaching in the program and also administrative work, which is really challenging at any university, but I think the state university systems have been really challenged for a lot of reasons—some of them political, some of them economic and budget related, some of them related to education, and just basic reasons. It’s just been a really, really complicated year for everyone. I’m amazed that we made it through the year without some kind of massive disaster. Graduation is tomorrow, so it’s possible that we will make it through the year.

Lara Ehrlich

Well, and thank you for joining us right before graduation, too. I know that must be incredibly busy. And you were telling me before the interview, you’re having 80 people at your house tomorrow.

Lan Samantha Chang 

I mean, we invited 80 people; we don’t think 80 people will make it over. Some people are still being cautious and not wanting to go to even outdoor events. We’re holding an outdoor event. One thing we did during the pandemic, and I think a lot of people did this, and I don’t know how I’m going to look at this in the future, but we moved to another house. This house is not a lot of space, but compared to our old house, which had a tiny wedge in front and then this tiny pocket in the back, it has enough space so that we can invite people over to raise a glass of bubbly to celebrate their graduations. I’m inviting the poets and fiction writers who are graduating this spring, and also the ones who graduated last spring who didn’t get anything. I mean, they basically had to shut down in March, and all of the usual festivities surrounding the end of their time in the program were abruptly canceled. It’s sort of upsetting to think about, and a lot of them are still in town. So, I ordered two cakes. One cake has their year, and one cake says 2021.

Lara Ehrlich

What brought you to the Iowa Writers Workshop?

Lan Samantha Chang

I’m married to a visual artist, and I’m a writer, and I would say that if you were going to stack up various artistic professions, I would say writer is actually more secure than visual artist. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m happy to argue.

Musician is also really bad. Actors are probably the worst, I’m not sure. I ended up getting that job that required us to move here. I went here as a student, and I knew they were looking for people, and I would chat with the administrator and we would talk about people that we thought would be good to direct the program. I would throw all these things at her, like, how about this person? How about this person? Problems always come up, like the faculty doesn’t like their writing, or they’re high strung, or they don’t want to move, they have a different job, they don’t need a job. Just a whole bunch of things. Eventually, she asked me to apply for it. This is really Dick Cheney, right? It’s like he was on the group of people looking for the vice president, and then he became the vice president. 

Eventually, I applied, super late in the process, and I was one of four finalists, which turned into this weird national media zoo, like the AP decided that this would be an interesting story for them, and they ran an article naming me and the other three finalists, all of whom were white guys, two of whom were considerably older than I. They ended up giving me the job, which … I don’t know what I think about it. 

I was in this stage of life where everything was happening super fast. I just published my second book, which was my first novel, which was just a terrible process of writing—it was so hard to write that novel. I can count on one hand the number of times that I truly enjoyed working on that novel. So, when I was finished, I sort of raised my head up, and it felt like it was seven years later. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, like I woke up and everything was different: I was getting married, I was thinking of having a family, and then all of a sudden, I just happened to apply for this job thinking that I wouldn’t get it but that it would be good to practice applying for jobs, and then I ended up getting it. Next thing we know, we move everything we own from Somerville, Massachusetts, to Iowa City, and then we have a child the following year. It was crazy. 

A lot of my younger students write stories about middle-aged characters, and I find this really fascinating because they’re in this wonderful period of life where they don’t actually need to think about it, but they are thinking about it. They’re trying to look ahead, and all of their characters have this sort of angsty, bored feeling. And I’m thinking, no, that’s not what it’s been like for me. It’s been one crazy thing after another, like everything is just happening, just, bam, bam, bam, bam. You hardly have any time to think, at some point. I look back, and I’m sure I’m gonna think you should have realized X, Y, and Z, but at this point, I can’t see it. I’ve got my nose right in it.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, that brings up so many questions. I also feel the same way, and my husband keeps saying that we’re middle aged and I’m like, “How can I be middle aged? I’m certainly not middle aged.”

Lan Samantha Chang

You don’t look middle aged.

Lara Ehrlich

My birthday was yesterday, and I turned 40.

Lan Samantha Chang

Oh, wow. That’s great. Congratulations. Happy birthday. Forty is a great decade. It is an amazing decade. It’s really nice.

Lara Ehrlich

I’ll take your word for it. It feels busier than it’s ever been. So, where do we start? Back way up to your first book. Tell me about your experience of writing the first one, and then what made the second one so different.

Lan Samantha Chang

Oh, God. Okay, so I didn’t start writing until I was in my mid-20s. I really had always wanted to be a writer since I was 4 years old, but I was trying to be practical, because my parents are immigrants, and they really didn’t want me to do something impractical. I have three sisters, and they all had normal lives. My two older sisters, one’s a lawyer, one’s a doctor—they’re doing just fine. 

I really reached a point in my mid-20s that I think other people I know who’ve been interested in writing have also hit, where they suddenly understand that they really just don’t want to do anything else, and if they’re not going to do the one thing they want to do in life, then it’s really hard to justify just what you’re doing. You just have to do it. 

I started taking these community classes in Cambridge, Mass., and wrote some stories and applied to Iowa, actually, and came here. I had just started writing, and my big goal was that I was going to learn how to write short stories. It seemed possible and manageable and decent and all that. And I was young, I was, like, 26, so it took me a really long time to write these stories, but I worked on them for a while, and then I published them. 

Meanwhile, all along, I’d always known that the thing that I’d love to read was novels. I love reading novels. I always thought it would be the most cool to try to write one, and that is where I got into trouble, because, frankly, I was under contract. I published the first book, the collection, as part of a two-book deal. It was a stressful experience for me because I’d never written a novel and didn’t understand how they’re different from stories. 

I had chosen this completely ridiculous topic. I wanted my story to take place in 20th-century China, which everyone knows is just this completely crazy century. My parents are from China, and they had told me tiny things about being there in the war when I was growing up. They never really talked about it. It’s the silence that a lot of people who’ve been through political trauma or personal trauma often don’t want to discuss. I basically spent seven years reconstructing an imaginary life, four characters, one of whom was similar in age to my mother, the protagonist and narrator, because I wanted to understand and write about my parents, but also because it was under contract. If I had not had a contract, I don’t know if I would have been stupid enough to attempt this project. But when you write a proposal for a project, you sort of have to complete the proposal, so I did it. Being a Capricorn, it took me forever. I did do a ton of research. 

Later, shortly after I published the book, Jonathan Safran Foer came out with Everything is Illuminated, and he revealed in interviews that he had never done any research for this book about returning to the land of his ancestors. And I thought, why didn’t I think of that? Why did I brush up my college Mandarin and ask people to read all these old newspapers? Like, why was I doing this? I could have just made it up. Part of the journey for me was simply that I needed to know for myself. 

It’s a funny thing, and I don’t think every writer is like this, but after I went through that process of writing this book, I haven’t wanted to revisit that whole century in any way. I have zero desire to write anything set in the century, in the place, nothing. It was like I was working it out, and now it’s gone. 

But it was horrible. It was just ridiculous. There was a point when I was trying to figure out how to end the novel. Every step in the process of writing this novel took a ridiculous amount of effort. For example, trying to figure out the point of view took years. Trying to figure out the narrator—not just the point of view, like first or third, which ended up being kind of a hybrid, but figuring out which of the characters was the narrator—took years. I remember getting to the middle and feeling okay and then having to rewrite the ending six or seven times. 

Every once in a while, maybe three times total, I showed the novel to my editor, Jill Bialosky at Norton, who’s a really wonderful person and also a novelist, poet, memoirist—a woman of letters—and she would give me helpful feedback, but she was sort of experienced enough to know that I wasn’t at a point where she could really tinker. I was still at this point where what I was supposed to be doing was figuring out really big things. That just took me such a long time. 

I think some of my students are much smarter than I am. They come up with these ideas, and then they’re fine with them. They just run with them, because they figured out a kind of constraint of what needs to be cut out of the picture, whereas I was stuck with way too much in the picture. I think so much of writing a novel is about coming up with a set of constraints or guidelines or a way to understand what you’re doing so that you can proceed in the right direction. Maybe I’m wrong, a ton of brilliant novels were written where the author had no idea what they were doing.

Lara Ehrlich

How did you apply what you’ve learned from that torturous process to the next novel?

Lan Samantha Chang

I had this rule with myself: you’re gonna write something short now. I was never the kind of person who was capable of writing a lot. Even my short stories aren’t very long, and it took me forever to be able to write 28 pages. It took me two years of writing stories before, and this in in 12-point Geneva font, double spaced—you know, a much larger font than Times New Roman, which is what everyone uses. Now, this is a million years ago, when Apple had Geneva as its font. I don’t know if anyone remembers this except me. 

I really just think that writing something long was hard, so I thought I’d write something short. A lot was happening—I moved here, I took this job, I learned how to do this job, I had a child—and I think this second book just came out of me really fast because I had been holding it in for such a long time. It was about something completely unrelated to 20th-century China. It was about the life of some poets. What I put into it was basically everything that I had learned or thought about when I was learning to write. A lot of things, like the lines that people say in the book, are literally things people said to me. I’ve mixed it all up, and I put them all into different characters and messed with all of that, but there were literally things people said to me. Like, someone literally said to me, “I don’t think writers actually get better.” Somebody that I truly respect, who’s known a ton of writers, more than anyone I know, said this to me. She said, “I think they write better books, they learn to write better books, but they don’t become better writers.” This is the kind of stuff that I put into the book. Mostly just processing. It was much faster. It was so fast and easy. And I still really enjoy that book. I reread it, and I like it. I will not touch the other book. Won’t even look at it.

Lara Ehrlich

We have some super fans here. We have Liz Harmer, who says, “I’m a huge super fan of that novel. I adore it.

Lan Samantha Chang

Oh, I’m so grateful. Thank you, Liz. 

Lara Ehrlich

Liz is an author with her own wonderful book who’s been on the show. Let’s talk a little bit about the birth of your daughter. You said you wanted to be a writer since you were 4, but did you always want to be a mother?

Lan Samantha Chang

When I was really young, I was very close to my mom, and my mom was not happy being the mother of small children in a house in Wisconsin full time. When I was growing up, I don’t think I was completely aware of it on a conscious level, but I knew it on an unconscious level. I knew that she was bored, because my mother was incredibly smart and always wanted to be intellectually stimulated, and we bored her. I know she loved me a lot, and we could really talk, but I also know that she had other things she wanted to do. 

And the other problem my mother had was moving to this country when she was 18, which is an age when you’re just about to master your native language. As a writer, you’re moving into that age. She left, and I feel like she didn’t have the pleasure of writing a ton in Chinese as a young adult or adult. She came to the U.S. and had to learn a new language and never achieved the kind of confidence that she had in her Chinese. Being in Wisconsin, we didn’t run into a ton of other Chinese people, which is something I write about in my new book. She made it really clear to me. 

Keeping in mind that I was born in 1965, and my mother is a creature of a generation where most people stayed at home and did not go out and get careers, she said to me, “There are plenty of other things to do. There are more important things to do than clean your house.” She was just like, “Don’t do these things. They’re a waste of time.” 

One reason I think she was able to say that is because she got sick. She got rheumatoid arthritis when she was 42, which basically meant that she had to throw away some of her perfectionist strategies. She was a big perfectionist. She basically just had to give up on that. I think that’s why she was able to tell me that you just have to focus on things. I would turn my camera around so that you can see this table. It’s just covered with stuff. I don’t sit down and clean it up every day. Things like that. 

I’m knitting mittens. I have a ton of pairs of mittens on this table, actually. I really enjoyed making them. I like this purple pair lot because of the speckle. Sometimes, when the students need something to raffle or give away at a reading or something, I give them a pair of mittens. And it’s just been a long winter. I did a lot of knitting.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, when you can’t write anymore, you need something to do.

Lan Samantha Chang

Yeah, I finished my novel this year, so basically, I had stopped knitting for the last two years of my writing this novel. Then I finished the novel, and I did an art project and all this stuff. All of a sudden, I started knitting like a crazy person. It’s back. The knitting is back. The writing is gone. Hopefully, something will happen that’ll make me start writing again and stop knitting.

Lara Ehrlich

Well, I want to talk about the new novel in a second and what’s next with writing, but first, let’s go back again to when your daughter was born. Tell me about that period.

Lan Samantha Chang

I feel so lucky that I was able to have a child. I was 42 when I had Tai. And because of my luck, I was not unhappy. I also had a super kind, generous husband, it turns out, who evolved amazingly as a father. He was always a shy person, but after we had Tai, he liked to walk around downtown. He just felt like a member of the human race after he had a child. I don’t think he did before. He just became a much more outgoing person. He’s always been reserved, and he just changed a lot.

I really loved being pregnant. It just felt really good. It felt like my body was doing something. I didn’t have to concentrate on it or focus on it. I was accomplishing stuff without trying at all. And then we had the baby. It was a lot of work and very different, and the first couple of weeks, I thought, okay, you have too many things in your life. Now you have a baby, you have a marriage, you have a job, and you have your writing. You need to eliminate one of these things in order to write, and you can’t eliminate the baby or the husband. Apply for a fellowship so that you can take some time off, or you will never write again. 

So, I applied, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I was able to spend two semesters working on something which turns out to be almost forgotten. I thought I was working on something else, but I never did finish that project. And it was a pleasure. It was really wonderful. First of all, it was a short book, and those are easier to write than long books, generally, but there was a period of time when I would get up and nurse the baby early in the morning, and then Rob would take the baby for an hour and a half, and I would work on this book. 

I had the Guggenheim, which gave me a mental excuse to work on something that I didn’t know what I was working on. And Rob actually said to me, “Well, why don’t you work on this mysterious project for a month of your fellowship? You won’t be wasting time if you only work on it for a month.” So, I did, and it turned out I made a lot of progress. I thought, how about one more month. I just basically finished it in six months, and then I had to let it sit because my job started up again. 

Then I revised it because I took my two semesters off. It was a wonderful experience. I never expect to have this experience again, where a novel just comes out and it feels right and it’s fine. It’s true that the whole time I was working on it, I thought no one would ever read it because it’s a story of a bunch of writers in an MFA program, which, frankly, is not that interesting. The novel starts with them in a program, and then it traces what happens to their lives afterward, and that, I think, is what makes it interesting. 

What made it interesting to me as a project was pulling their lives out and seeing what became of the people who behaved in a certain way when they were a certain age. It was really interesting to me, especially given my job, where I was observing people all the time, wondering what would become of them. That was a real pleasure. 

Then I fell into the hole. I think when Tai started running around, it was a lot harder for me to focus. I’ve always been somebody who has trouble multitasking—it’s one of my major problems—and so I really stopped writing for almost four years, which I now think, oh my God, I can’t believe I survived that. But I did do a ton of knitting, because my job is overwhelming. 

I had always been one of these writers who’s kind of antisocial and always had a lot of time and didn’t really have very many people in my life, just a few really good friends, so I always had a lot of privacy, a lot of time. And even given all of that, it was incredibly hard for me to finish a book. 

Then the second book was hell. Really, what happened after publishing is all is forgotten, which was a gift. After I published it, I basically had to start from scratch and construct a way to get writing done, despite the fact that I had this lovely child. I had to just start figuring that out from scratch, which is, in my opinion, the major accomplishment of my middle age—figuring out how to write the book I just finished—and I’m really grateful to everyone who helped me. My acknowledgments page is four or five pages long. It’s so long.

Lara Ehrlich

Congratulations on finishing it. That’s huge. Let’s talk about building that process back from scratch. Your daughter was 5 or 6 when you started writing again?

Lan Samantha Chang

Here’s what happened. The Vermont Studio Center invited me to come out and be a guest writer there, which basically means that you get five days at the center, and during that time, you eat your meals with everyone, you teach a class, you give a reading, and you meet with however many people who want to meet with you to discuss their work. You read their manuscripts, which is a fair amount of work, but the rest of the time, you’re free, which for anybody who’s been in a family situation is just an insane gift. It was just such a huge gift. 

I remember they gave us a little apartment in this nice house, and I remember sitting in this comfy chair and thinking, oh my god, this is what I needed. I need to figure out how I can get more of this because I feel like myself for the first time in … I don’t know how many years. Tai was probably five and a half. So, I started applying to artist colonies. 

The first time I applied to an artist colony, I was rejected, because I didn’t have any recent work. I didn’t look like I’d been doing anything, and the fact is, I get that, but sometimes I feel that’s when you need to go most desperately to a residency, but whatever. 

I basically just scraped up time to scrape up 20 pages of something, which is really what you need, 20 pages that seem like they could be something meaningful. It doesn’t have to be a complete story, because I was unable to finish a short story at the time. I got into Yaddo, and I was there for 13 days. Tai was 7. This is a long process. You apply one year, and then you go sometime the following year. I went to Yaddo when Tai was 7. It was 13 days. I’d never spent 13 days away from her before. I was lucky because my husband adores her, so he and she had developed this really good relationship, partly based, I think, on what they do when I’m not at home.

I will tell you that the reason I ended up coming up with this strategy is that I ran into a male writer, who’s also a parent, who I had met when I was a Stegner fellow. He was not in my year. We met one year at AWP, and he’s like, “How is your writing going?” I’m like, “I’m not writing.” He said, “This is what you have to do. You have to go to these residences. You just have to go to the residency. That’s what I do.” He said, “I try to be a model father, I try to do everything I can possibly do to help my partner when I’m at home, and then when I get to have four weeks away from home every year, once a semester.” 

And I thought, well, “I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can get away from not only my child but my job,” but when I was at the Vermont Studio Center, I used that time to apply to a residency. I got into Yaddo, I went there for 13 days, and the first eight or nine days, I didn’t get anything done. I just sat there. I don’t even know what I was doing. I think it was such a strange experience, and I felt like I didn’t have anything to say. 

Then I was having breakfast with one of the other writers, and she told an anecdote about something that happened to her many, many years before the moment we were in. There was something about the way she told the anecdote, I just went back to my room and started writing. My last two days there, I applied to another residency. I’ve been basically managing to write from one residency to the next for maybe five years after that. 

I have this elaborate chart of where I applied to things. I think the number of times I’ve been to some of these places is embarrassing—and embarrassing because I feel like I should have produced something by now. I think I’ve been to Yaddo three times. MacDowell twice, Ragdale three or four times. I’ve been to a place called Write On, Door County, which is this wonderful place in Door County, where you can just be left alone for a week in a house. I went to the Rome Academy, I went to Hedgebrook, which is a wonderful place. Basically, that’s how I got my book done. 

Once, when I was at MacDowell, one of the really powerful MacDowell composers said that he gets six months’ worth of work done every time he goes to MacDowell for four weeks. And if that’s true, I think I’ve worked for six years on this book, not counting the work I do when I’m not at a residency. 

It’s really weird. I’m lucky because my husband was willing to take care of Tai. My mother told me once that some children are angry when their mother leaves them and act out in an angry way when the mother returns. She said this to me in a warning way. At one point, she also said to me, “You’re lucky that she doesn’t get angry,” and the fact is, she doesn’t. She’s a really lovely person. But even if she did get angry, I think I would just have to explain to her that I really need to do this. I can’t not do this. The other thing that helped me start getting work in was the recognition that I was really turning the corner. I was getting quite old. My own mother died during this time. It became really clear to me that at a certain point, you just have to get your work done, or you will die without having accomplished it, which is a big deal. I got the book done.

Lara Ehrlich

For many of the women listening right now who are interested in residencies and listening to the variety of places that are available, can you talk a little bit about the logistics of applying? And as someone who directs the writing program, you may be in the perfect position to give some advice about applications.

Lan Samantha Chang

I’ve actually read for a couple places, so I can give a little information. Everywhere I’ve read for has the following thing: They don’t give the readers too many things to read, so that you’re not overwhelmed, and you can really pay attention to the applications. The applications consist of generally 20 pages or so—I think it’s pages instead of word count, so I guess that would be 6,000 words in 20 pages of a writing sample. 

When I look at work for this kind of thing, the first thing I look at is the writing sample. I mean, it’s really clear. And it’s the same way with the MFA programs: the writing sample comes first. Twenty pages is not too bad, right? You can try to make your work as strong as possible for 20 pages. I try to encourage myself when I’m applying by thinking I can try to write 20 good pages of something or a 20-page story, short story, even if I want to write a novel, and I’ve only written short stories, that’s great. Short stories are great. 

Then there’s always a place where you put down what you plan to accomplish when you’re here. And this is my honest opinion. If you have a plan, you should be as sincere as possible and an honest as possible in saying it. But if you don’t have a plan, because you’re just overwhelmed, you should just make something up.

Lara Ehrlich

This is some real advice here.

Lan Samantha Chang

They won’t mind if you go there and end up working on something else.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, they’re not going to come knocking on your door and see if you’re writing the thing you said you’d write.

Lan Samantha Chang

Exactly. And actually, the director at the time said to us on our first day, “I don’t mind if you just go stare at Lake Michigan for three weeks. I really don’t care.” And that is the kind of liberating permission-granting language that you can hear at a residency that makes you feel like okay, maybe it’s okay if I’m not super productive. Maybe it’s okay if I just do this thing. Usually, I’m there for a few weeks, and I’ll spend the first week not doing anything, and then it’ll slowly kick in, and I’ll have some amazing periods. Some people, of course, are able to work nonstop. Good for them. I’m really proud of them. But I have not been that way. 

Then in the application, I think they ask you for a CV. They ask if you’ve been to other residencies. My guess is that it does help to have been to another one. That’s my guess. I also think it helps to say I have never been to a residency before. Somewhere in between those two things. Choose one of those two things to say. Because if you say, “I have never been before,” it gives a person an empowering feeling that oh, I can give this person something that will really help their writing. But if you say I’ve been to X, Y, and Z place, then the admissions committee could think, okay, this person is somebody who has been to X, Y, and Z place, so I guess we could have them here. Do you know what I’m saying? I don’t think there’s a wrong answer to that. 

There’s this thing in the literary world. I feel like people love “discovering” people. That’s the big thing. So, you know, make yourself discoverable. I think that trying to be sincere, rather than trying to impress is what will make the work memorable. I think lot of the residencies really do choose people on the basis of the writing sample. 

The other thing is that it is just so subjective, people’s opinions about other people’s work. I’m sure everyone knows this, but it’s just ridiculous how different people’s opinions can be on the same thing. It goes for applying to an MFA program or anything else. We change up our admissions reading committee at our program every year, because we just don’t believe that we’re getting everyone. 

So, if you don’t get into such and such residency, just keep reapplying, if you have the $30 or whatever it costs to apply, and some places even have fee waivers. There are a ton of residencies that are either new or in a faraway place or low key that not everyone applies to. I’ve had really great experiences at places that are brand new or places where they don’t feed you, but you could just go and sit in a house and work and eat snacks. It’s just getting that time alone that, for me, has been a total saving experience. That’s my take on that. Do it because that gift of time.

Lara Ehrlich

I met you at Bread Loaf, five or six years ago now, and I remember that you brought your daughter with you and probably your husband, too. Were you able at that particular retreat to engage fully with your daughter there? Or did you feel torn in some ways?

Lan Samantha Chang

I think the thing that made me feel torn during the times I was at Bread Loaf was that I didn’t get to live in the same building as the other faculty. I mean, I’m just being super honest. They found me a really lovely place where my daughter and husband and I were able to live, and it was wonderful, but I didn’t get to have those late-night conversations with other faculty that I wish that I could have had. And what can you do? I was thrilled that they came along with me. I think when Tai was 12 weeks old, we were at Bread Loaf, and I think I was nursing her all the time in the front row at the little theater. People were kind to her. My students were super understanding of her being around, too.

Lara Ehrlich  

I would hope so. That was probably a year before I got pregnant, and I was really struggling with whether I could be a writer and a mother. And I have to say, seeing you there with your child was so empowering to me. So, thank you for bringing your family. You hear so much about how hard it is, you don’t see women actually doing it out in the world.

Lan Samantha Chang

I feel lucky that, for example, the people in my office have always been extremely supportive of me having her around at work and at various things. I think there was a 75th reunion for the workshop when she was 3, and she was just wandering around, and when I went up to give a talk, she would walk up and stand next to me. And actually, the people who were upset about it were the women from the generation above me who were my bosses, like the dean said that she thought she shouldn’t have been there much later, but everyone else was totally great about it. I think the only reason the dean was upset about it was because she was stressed. I think she came from a generation where people just didn’t do that. But now we’re in another generation. You can do that. You can basically do whatever.

Lara Ehrlich

Totally, and I think it’s so important. I’ve seen this so much more now with a pandemic of women working from home, myself included, who say to their colleagues, “I’m sorry, I have to go make lunch for my child,” or whatever it is. I feel lucky to be able to do that. I have a job that that encourages me to, but it’s also important for women to show their children, I think.

Lan Samantha Chang

I think it’s super important. I think it’s important to the entire society, not just to other women. I think it’s important for people to know that children exist in their parents’ lives.

Lara Ehrlich

Absolutely. Tell me about the new book that comes out in 2022. Tell us a little bit about what it’s about.

Lan Samantha Chang

You know, I’m one of four sisters, and I didn’t want to write a book about sisters. For years, I was obsessed with The Brothers Karamazov. I taught classes on the book at the workshop, where people would just read it and then we would meet and discuss. I was obsessed. I started to imagine that something I had started writing in 2005 was actually told in a voice that could carry over into a Chinese American Brothers Karamazov. 

I started thinking about a present tense voice, which I’ve never, ever been interested in ever. I just started writing in this voice, and I really enjoyed it. It was fun. Sometimes I feel like the books that I’ve written can’t encompass how complicated my personality is, because I grew up in a very homogeneous community in the upper-Midwest many years ago, because we were an immigrant family. We were one of maybe three Chinese families in our town and maybe four Asian families in the town of 50,000. I’ve developed a lot of different parts of my personality. I just couldn’t find a vehicle to express it all until I came up with this project. 

I remember writing Hunger and writing a fight between her father and daughter and feeling like I wanted to be able to write a scene in which people are just screaming at each other, but it doesn’t fit into the story—like people screaming at each other, people laughing, people being loud, people being contemptuous, people using a ton of exclamation points just didn’t fit into Hunger. 

Hunger was a quiet book about immigrants suffering. I really felt for Hunger when I wrote it. I felt all those feelings. It was my effort to recreate the feelings that I felt our family had felt, and so, I did that. But then I also felt like there was this whole side which is basically this really loud family that ate a lot, fought a fair amount of the time, unhappy, and also laughing a ton. That was my family. I found these characters. I figured them out. 

The archetypes are in the Brothers Karamazov, but they’re basically there’s three brothers and a terrible father and the brothers’ love interests, who are characters of their own. I added a dog that belongs to this family. It’s an actual dog that I know. There’s a real dog in an imaginary book. It’s great. It’s about a community in the Midwest and about a particular family in that community, and the disliked, much-hated patriarch of the family mysteriously dies. The question becomes how did he die? Was it an accident? Or was it a murder? And if so, then who did it? This runs through the whole book.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, it sounds wonderful.

Lan Samantha Chang

I really, really enjoyed writing it.

Lara Ehrlich

I can tell from the way that you describe it that it seems like it was fun.

Lan Samantha Chang

My life is so busy and stressful, I wanted to write something to entertain myself, something that was fun.

I remember having a conversation with Lauren Groff where she said, “What percentage done are you?” And I said, “I’m 41 or 42 percent”—at the time, that was basically where I was. She said a lot of people would just go publish that book at 42 percent, but you’re gonna work on it more. She was talking about how much I wanted to work on it. 

One of the things I did to encourage myself was to keep track of what percent I was on and break my work into three-month cycles. Every three months, I would stop and say, “Okay, you finished a draft,” no matter where I was, and then I would start over again. It was really helpful. You know, there’s something really helpful for me, and I don’t know if it’s true for everyone, every three months reassessing where I am, starting another three months. I have this log that I keep track of every writing day, and then at the end of three months, I stop and start another log and say, this is what I want to do for the book, this in this draft. It’s super helpful for me. It took me, what? Thirty years to come up with a strategy where I’m actually getting work done on a regular basis. I’m just much slower than the average person.

Lara Ehrlich

If you want to take a picture of your logbook and maybe your mittens, too, we can put them up on the Instagram page for Writer Mother Monster.

Lan Samantha Chang

Sure, okay. That would be exciting.

Lara Ehrlich

Would you like to read a few pages from the new book?

Lan Samantha Chang

Oh, wow. Sure. I’d like to read a little bit from the new book.

Lara Ehrlich

Send us off with a few pages.

Lan Samantha Chang

Okay, I’ll just start with the very opening. It’s called The Family Chao, and the book is in memory of James Alan McPherson, who is my beloved teacher who died in 2016. The first section is called Part I: They See Themselves.

For 35 years, everyone supported Leo Chao’s restaurant, introducing choosing newcomers to show off some real food, Chinese food in Haven, Wisconsin, bringing children, parents, grandparents, not wanting to dine out with the Americans, not wanting to think about which fork to use. You could say the manifold tensions of life in the new country focused on the future. Tracking incremental gains and losses were relieved by the fine Chao, sitting down under the dusty red lanterns, gazing at Leo’s latest calendar with a limp-haired Taiwanese sylphs that when he hated so much, waiting for supper, everyone felt calm. In dark times, when you’re feeling homesick or defeated, there is really nothing like a good, steaming soup and dumplings made from scratch. Winnie and Big Leo Chao were serving scallion pancakes decades before you could find them outside of a home kitchen. Leo, 35 years ago, winning his first poker game against the owners of a local poultry farm, exchanged his chips for birds that Winnie transformed into the shining chestnut colored duck dishes of far-off cities. Dear Winnie, rolling out her being the homemade way two pats of dough together with a seal of oil in between rising to a steaming bubble in the piping pan, Leo bargaining for hard-to-get ingredients, Winnie subbing wax beans for yard-long beans, plus home growing the garlic greens, chives, and hot peppers you never used to find in Haven, their garden giving off a glorious smell. You could say the community ate its way through the child family’s distress, not caring whether Winnie was happy, whether Big Chao was an honest man, everyone took in the food on one side of their mouths. And from the other side, they extolled the parents for their son’s accomplishments, heaping praise upon the three boys growing up all bright and ambitious earning scholarships to good colleges, commending them for leaving the Midwest. Yet everyone was thankful when the oldest, Dalgo Chao, returned to Haven, Dalgo coming home to his mother, moving into the apartment over the restaurant, working there six days a week. Dalgo, the most passionate cook in the family. Despite the trouble between Winnie and Big Chao, everyone assumed the business would be handed down fairly peacefully, father to son. And now, a year after the shame, the intemperate and scandalous events that began on a winter evening in Union Station, the community defends its 35-year indifference to the child family’s troubles by saying, “No one could have believed that such good food was cooked by bad people.”

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you. Oh, how wonderful. Remind everyone when it comes out and when to preorder.

Lan Samantha Chang  

I think preorders are starting in a couple of months, and the book is coming out in February 2022.

Lara Ehrlich

When it’s up for preorder, let me know. I’ll put it up on social so that people see that, and I’ll be the first to get one.

Lan Samantha Chang

Oh, thanks so much Lara. This has been so much fun. 

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much for joining me.

Lan Samantha Chang

Thank you for having me.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you. And thank you all for joining us as well.