Addie Tsai was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. She has been the recipient of scholarships with the Indiana University Writer's Conference and Tin House's Summer Literary Seminars Contest, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her manuscript of poems, and in its place— was finalist in Four Way Books' Larry Levis Prize, and semi-finalist in Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has been published in Post Road Magazine, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality, BORN Magazine, NOON: A Journal of the Short Poem, Caketrain, Forklift, Ohio, American Letters & Commentary, and Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian-American Women's Poetry, among others. Her photography has been shown at Fotofest, Box 13 (as part of TX BI 2011: A Celebration of Texas-based Bisexual Artists and in collaboration with Traci Matlock, the body as landscape: the body as terror: the body as ecstasy) and Watson Gallery (the second self: a series of self-portraits). She has collaborated twice with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater; first with Victor Frankenstein as co-conceiver and as narrative collaborator on Camille Claudel. She currently teaches Composition and Literature at Houston Community College, where she also is coordinator of a poetry series which highlights nationally-recognized poets of color.
An excerpt from her memoir What Came Between Them appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, Addie Tsai talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the one, the two, and the rifts between poetry and non-fiction.
1. Since this is an excerpt, I’m curious to know both how you went about writing this section and why you chose this section to stand on its own. Could you please talk some about that?
I am, first and foremost, a poet. Aside from a personal essay class I took in college, I’ve had very little experience writing nonfiction. This memoir is a long time in the making, in a sense, because I’ve wanted to write a memoir about the two incidents of my adolescence that are introduced in this excerpt for years. There are a number of reasons that I took my time to start this project. First of all, it took me a number of years to work out emotionally the conflicts and struggles that are connected to these particular childhood experiences. You need a certain distance to address material as a nonfiction writer, and for many years, I simply wasn’t ready, emotionally, to handle the material in a way that would give the kind of honor, truth, and openness that I felt was needed. I had to do a lot of other work psychically to ready myself – so that I was conscious in the literary and emotional choices made in the writing of it.
Most of this excerpt was written at the very beginning of this process, except for the section The Twins Love Each Other Before They Hate Each Other. When I had about seventy pages of the draft written, I sought out the advice and feedback of a friend of mine, fiction and nonfiction writer Mat Johnson, who teaches creative writing in the graduate program at the University of Houston. He gave me some suggestions for how to open out the narrative, how to generate more material for the memoir. One of the suggestions he gave was to show a time in which the narrator felt connected to her sister, so that the power of their rupture would mean more and make more narrative sense to the reader. The Twins Love Each Other Before They Hate Each Other was born from that suggestion.
It was hard to discern what to include in the excerpt. This section establishes the main premise the memoir undertakes, and introduces the memoir’s main narrative frame, including the central conflict and crucial characters. That was ultimately why I chose this piece as a stand-alone excerpt for The Collagist.
Writing this section was difficult, especially as so much of this section was some of the first writing I ever did for the memoir. I had to excavate memories from a particularly difficult time in my life, while also staying focused on the conflict and narrative of the entire book. What helped me through this section was that I had an idea of the kind of formal structure and voice I want as a hinge to keep the book together—a kind of lyric essayistic prose that fused the lyric voice with the reflective narration of memoir.
2. I found it interesting that for most of the selection that you refer to the twins as a set, “the girls,” or “she and I,” without explicitly using your/her names. Could you please talk about this decision and the challenges and/or successes that you found working with it?
The memoir has not been published yet, but for the moment, my sister is named in the book. I imagine this will change upon publication based on a number of reasons. Because of the sensitivity of material that I’m addressing, and the online availability of the publication, I made a decision to remove my twin’s name. That’s the reason for the “she” you speak of.
Describing the twins as a set, or as the girls is a different matter, however. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because of society’s relationship to twins and twinning. Most of the books that you can find on Amazon, or the pieces written that deal with twins, are written from others (a parent, scientist, etc.) about twins. The twins are often objectified, made into a pair of objects. The relationship a person who is an identical twin has to identity is complex. This is for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons inevitably has to do with the way society views twins, the way that culture connects identity to physicality. We recognize people for having a distinct look—what gets taken away from one’s individuality when their look is replicated in the world? Those books that are written by twins often express, in my mind, a romanticized view of twinning, in which identical twins have a close bond with one another, share each others clothes and inhabit the same social circles. This is not to say that I distrust that experience expressed from a twin—but my experience as a twin was fraught by the fact that in my experience, I (or we, rather) was not allowed a space to form my own sense of individuality within that joint frame. I felt it important to share a story of the reality of twinning, the conflict that arises for identical twins in relationship to identity, two-ness, and a shared sense of self. Part of the excerpt addresses a significant part of my childhood, in which my father dressed us in identical outfits before taking us to his cultural outings, which included plays he performed in with his Mandarin-speaking friends. In those identical outfits we were also asked to sing Chinese karaoke by spelling out the foreign words in English sounds. This happened on and off for ten years of our childhood. In those moments, how could we be seen as anything else but the girls, the twins, a set of two?
My MFA thesis—when I was studying poetry at Warren Wilson College—centered heavily on family, and only in the last year on twinning. I started my semester with my thesis advisor—Matthea Harvey—by giving her a sense of what in my personal narrative the poems were addressing, and about my general aesthetic desires and concerns in my work. I had only written a few poems about twinning then, and Matthea responded to my letter detailing my relationship and experience to being an identical twin (along with my focus on the image) that I think back to often:
“Your impulse to understand things through image as opposed to voice does make sense—if you look the same, the way you look at things may be what differentiates you from your twin.”
*
I have thought a lot about the role of audience in memoir. What do we want from the readers? Do we want them to relate to the experience on some level, or to come to a wholly different experience, to discover something new? Of course I want to express my unique experience, this is part of my motivation in writing the book, but I also hope that others will find something in the book that they can connect to and have an experience of relating to the story, and perhaps distancing themselves from the story, too. Outside of the twinning frame of the book, it’s important to me that the sexual trauma that surrounds the narrative is dealt with as well. Part of what makes twinning such a different experience from the experience of single-hood is the collective: you are born into two. You are seen as two, and you experience the world, at least at the beginning, as a we. In order for the reader to internalize on any level what that experience is like for the narrator, the collective must be included in a memoir about twinning. In the piece that most substantially uses the collective as you describe, The Twins Love Each Other Before They Hate Each Other, the most significant challenge was referring to each one as an individual twin (the one on the left, the one on the right, etc) and as the set at the same time. This was crucial to me in terms of the building of that piece, because it embodies the double-lives (oneness-twoness) that twins experience in the world. Once written, however, it feels absolutely necessary to establish that paradigm for the reader before moving on to the separate experiences and conflicts that the speaker and her twin face.
3. After reading your piece, I googled you, and found your blog entry that you had written about getting this piece of the memoir published. In it, you spoke about how people have reacted to it in a way that was intense, and that “Poetry just doesn’t affect people this way.” Could you talk more about this difference that you’ve experienced between poetry and non-fiction?
I’ve written poetry seriously for the past 12 years. I’m certain that most readers could see a thread, structurally and thematically, between the work I’ve done in poetry and the work I’ve done in prose. But, poetry is the work of the interior. I think, because of this, there are many people in my life who read my work with a kind of admiration of its aesthetic, but could never fully grasp what the poem means, what it’s about. Here I’m speaking mainly of people in my life who are not in pursuit of writing, and who do not spend a majority of their time, if any, reading poetry. In addition, however, I feel because the poetry I write is not…traditional in form and voice, it’s possible even readers of my work that are poets themselves might not ever feel they can fully enter a poem I’ve written. There’s a directness in memoir, a literal telling of the story, that brings a reader—any reader—into the space with your work in a wholly different way. The piece on The Collagist went live while I was asleep and away from my computer. When I discovered it the next morning, I hesitated, but ultimately decided to post it on my Facebook wall, to share the link on the listserve with my MFA alumni, and to write an entry on my blog about it. Within three hours I received many comments, emails, and text messages about how moved they were by the piece. Not only were they moved, but one friend in particular sent me many questions the piece brought up for him—about my life, my family, my experience at that time. Friends were instantly interested in the rest of the draft, what came after. This is, of course, what you want as a writer, for your work to be connected with and to be received with such heat and energy. But I’ve never had readers receive my work in poetry in such a visceral, voyeuristic and curious manner. I think it’s because the work in nonfiction joins a number of things that we as humans respond to in a very embodied way. You get access to another’s story, from the interior as well as the exterior. And in my case, I am also excavating a story that is connected to trauma which I think triggers something in us as readers as well. Another difference, in my opinion, between the reading of poetry and nonfiction has to do with accessibility and education. We hear stories from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep, we receive them electronically and aurally, and we’ve been told stories for most of our lives. We experience poetry, even for those of us that pursue the craft of poetry, far less frequently than that. At just a small fraction in comparison. We respond to stories on a much more intuitive level, especially those delivered to us as true, whereas our reception and interpretation of poems, I think, are far more conscious and learned.
4. What have you been reading recently that felt like (a good!) punch in the face?
For the last year, since I finished the draft of the memoir, I’ve been hard at work on a book about hysteria and twinning. To prepare for the writing of this project, I’ve been reading lots and lots of psychoanalytic theory on the subject. Consequently, I’ve also been reading about melancholia, its possible relationship to hysteria, and their relationship to the work of Marguerite Duras, who was the most considerable influence for me with the memoir. There are three books I’m reading simultaneously that are incredible in their excavating of and around such a complex phenomenon:
Hysteria
- Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (Juliet Mitchell)
Melancholia/Duras
- Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (Julia Kristeva)
Twinning
- To Be Two (Luce Irigaray)
5. What are you plans with the rest of this memoir? Any other writing projects going on?
Oops, it looks like I started answering this question early! A few weeks ago, I recently revised the memoir and sent it off. I am still looking for a press for the book, but no hard-lined success yet. I feel really confident about the newest draft, however, so I’m hopeful! I am also still sending out my manuscript of poems, and in its place—.
*
In terms of current writing projects, I just finished collaborating on a dance theater project about the French sculptor Camille Claudel. My official title was narrative collaborator, but my role on the project is most commonly known to others as Dramaturg. It’s the second time I’ve worked with this company, the first of which was as co-conceiver with Victor Frankenstein, a dance theater production that focused on the novel, as well as Mary Shelley’s relationship to her mother and her husband, poet Percy Shelley.
My latest writing project explores my relationship to the intersection between hysteria and twinning (the title currently fluctuates, almost daily, between The Performance of Suffering and The Twin Who Was Not Hysteric. At the moment, it appears the book will be a cross-genre between myth and memoir, and hopefully will include photographic work as well. I’ve been interested in hysteria for about five years, an interest that was born out of my work with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but only in the last year have I focused solely on it as my latest writing enterprise. I hope to spend most of this summer working on it.