I start my Adroit Summer Mentorship syllabus with this quote from Amber Sparks because I think one thing all writers have in common no matter how long we've been writing (or not-writing) is our uncompromising imposter syndrome:
I love this program. I love working with young writers and I love a summer of reading and writing stories. I’m so grateful we get to chart out and explore, imposter-syndrome-be-damned, together.
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This year, the first reading assignment on the syllabus is Ocean Vuong’s Beginnings. Like many stories of beginnings, it’s a portrait of contrasts. Of art-making versus survival. Of privilege and poverty. Of lucidity and dementia.
Vuong starts his poetry studies with a full scholarship and nowhere to live. He couch surfs as long as he can, and then spends what he describes as “three long weeks” homeless, sleeping in Penn Station in New York City.
What he experiences during those weeks isn’t just homeless. He feels himself turn invisible. “Your body, the space around your body, blurs into the landscape,” he writes, “you are seen less and less until you actually become the landscape. No one looks at you, even as you shout and beg, even as you scream for help. The psychological effect is startling mostly because it isn’t all external. You are an outsider not only because others deem you as such, but also because you start to see yourself as one. That’s the power of social isolation.”
Even his use of the 2nd person emphasizes this—it’s intimate and detached, close yet faceless. For me as a reader, it brings up feelings of shame, of the times I’ve turned someone else invisible, of the way I learned to be unresponsive to strangers in a city, to act as if they were translucent until…they actually kind of are. I’ve never been the ‘you’ Ocean Vuong is talking to.
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Vuong is writing a poem one night, when he’s approached by a man in Penn station—Sage, who writes poems too. In little scraps, fast food wrappers, the blank pages of books. It’s compulsory, it’s something a lot of writers have felt in common—that fire at your heels. Sage gets excited, pulls out poems, shares his favorite—and then starts giving Vuong advice.
Vuong has been isolated for so long—because, invisibility—that he’s like hungry for this, for connection and conviction:
“There was no one to turn to and say “ Can you believe this guy?” and get a reaffirming shrug or nod or eye roll. I found myself losing the ability to measure normalcy against the rest of the world. We were surrounded by the drone of hundreds of people and yet I found ourselves enclosed inside a sort of booth, occupied by me and Sage. What was sane or insane suddenly had no bearing. It just didn’t matter anymore.”
And of course writing is about connecting, about it not-mattering with who or when or what else is going on. It’s kind of life-saving that way. Reading is and so is writing—there’s a quote I like about how writing is sending a sound out into the dark and listening for what sounds come back. Writing is about listening and being listening to. But also that’s how we survive? We can not survive invisibly. Or alone.
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Oh my god. Then Motown.
“[A]s if from some sort of distant memory, there was music. Just like that. Not the light and bland train lobby instrumentals—it was real music, it was Motown.
[...] I saw the other homeless men and women begin to cheer up as they gathered and lay down around the song. Their limbs started to move and gesticulate as they warmed up to one another. As if through the song’s familiar landscape, they were able to see each other as human begins again.”
God I love this scene. I love how what brings people together is song, lyric, music, word. How communal song and poetry is.
But also how our sadness connects us. How we are less alone because we are not the only ones in pain.
I believe in writing for this reason—I believe in the empathy it creates, the invisible strings that connect us. I feel often the first person we’re writing to is the self because the self is lonely and hard to understand. In my case, I’ve been pretty hard on her. I’ve worked hard to be more gentle. And writing, then, is a way to hear and listen to the self but also to send that word out into the dark—to find a separate self. Who is also in their own way alone and tangled in their own invisible strings.
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It is such a relief in Vuong’s story when a friend calls and offers him a free room in exchange for caring for a woman with dementia. I feel relieved. I have been spinning with his four sporadic hours of sleep each night, his shame at telling his cohort and friends, the way he’d been turning invisible. I am on his heels when he grabs that train and heads to a brownstone in old Brooklyn.
He meets Grazina, the woman he’ll be living with and caring for.
And again I’m struck my Vuong’s absolute kindness:
“To make her feel at ease, I would always use her native tongue and say “Labas” instead of “hello.”
[...] Eventually, she just called me Labas and to keep it simple, I called her Labas as well. From then on, we would greet each other by saying, “Hi, Labas!””
There is care here again with how words create comfort—how he even doesn’t mind not being called Ocean because, for Grazina, it may make her feel shame, that she is confusing a man for a body of water. That they call each other just “Labas” is so kind. What is a hello if not a beginning. What is a beginning if not a name.
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Vuong is shown his room.
A room of his own.
In the corner is an old laminate desk with three and a half legs. He asks to keep it and realizes—this is his FIRST DESK. He writes:
“It didn’t occur to me until then that having a desk of my own, something I did not have even in Connecticut, somehow legitimized my identity as a writer. It was a badge, a label, a dedication, my vehicle and anchor. And, having no publication and barely any respectable poems, the desk was a promise of possibilities, that good work would be done, and it would be done right here.”
A desk is permission, in a lot of ways, a place of possibility, as he writes. An anchor. A lot of us writers, when we think of writing, we think of that place. That quiet room, that flat surface, the way the light falls—ochre or blue or white—through our windows. The desk too is a kind of beginning. It is permission to start.
I’m going to off-road briefly. I’m thinking about Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
His book opens with the line, “Let me begin again.”
And that to me sums up what writing is—we are always beginning, first-timing, inhaling, anchoring when we come to the page. We’ve done it a thousand times and will do it thousands of times more, but it is brand new each time. Let me begin! Again! Because the blank page is no joke! I usually don’t go near it unless I’m already armed with a sentence, an idea, a string of sounds in my head.
I think about how Vuong is talking about beginnings in Beginnings, but also in his novel. How we’re again-ing. Labas.
In this essay as well as his novel, Vuong explores what it means to be survivor of war—that trauma that’s almost etched into your DNA. He shares a memory of his grandmother telling stories that almost turned into songs. They were beautiful—but that beauty was almost like an armor. They needed to be beautiful to be palatable.
He writes:
“She would close her eyes, the words coming slow at first, but soon they sputtered and surged, always growing into a song—albeit a fractured one. It was as if pain could not be told in any other way, that only through singing, could the memory exit the burden of a body and flourish as something abstract and, therefore, tolerable.”
It is hard to write, to tell stories. Stories can’t exist without pain.
And they can’t exist—again—without connection.
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This is a sad essay, but that’s okay.
Grazina’s dementia makes it hard for her to understand Vuong is not her 48-year-old son Eric. Sometimes she is baking cabbages hoping to feed a guest who never arrives. Sometimes she waits hours for a person she hopes is coming. It must be so hard to know you’re not connecting, to not entirely know why, but KNOW something is off?
It must be so hard not knowing if you’re going to connect or not.
That too is a kind of invisibility.
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One night when Grazina is having a particularly bad attack, Vuong is able to bring her back. He sings to her.
“I start to sing a Vietnamese folk song, mostly to comfort myself. My voice unsteady and crackling, I guide the dirge of my grandmother’s lost country into Grazina’s ears and through her buckling body. I sing, the long sad notes of ancient Vietnamese poets. And, after about thirty seconds of this, Grazina begins to wilt from her body’s long and tarnished history and returns to the present. I keep up the song and can feel her breathing slowing, her clutch easing. My singing softens into a whisper. It’s suddenly quiet.”
He is doing that thing when he’s making something for himself, first, to ground himself. He is unsteady but grows steadier. He reaches her. She finds him and together they soften and calm. This is what song, poetry, story is about. Maybe it’s not only about sending a word out into the dark but our hands as well—we are searching for each other.
We are no longer alone.
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We get to the thesis at the very end. I like that. It’s very contrarian, to not start with a thesis.
He writes:
“Before I sit down to write, I always hum my grandmother’s song, the one I sang and would keep singing to Grazina. The simple ritual helps me focus my attention to the page, like a call to prayer, if you will. I write because I believe in the unquestionable power of words, that poetry can change a life, perhaps not in that one sweeping moment of profound epiphany, but like the words we chisel into the page, our world, and the experiences we make from it, is changed through time, through that steady erosion and resurfacing of meaning.”