FOREVER
LEARNING
WITH
ALEXANDER
CHEE

Chee is joined by writer and translator JACQUI CORNETTA and Buds’ own BEN TOUSLEY. The three discuss discomfort as a way into the creative process, the joys of the writing cabin, and the time he found his book of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, in the advice section of a New Zealand bookstore.

Reflecting on his past year writing on a Guggenheim fellowship, CHEE says, “I know now that I'm in this really cool place. I get to think of what's out past the perimeter of what you dreamed for yourself when you were younger.”

BEN TOUSLEY: Hi, Alex. How are you? We’re joined by writer, translator, and editor Jacqui Cornetta, who I thought could be a great fit for this conversation. Thank you so much for doing this. You were in New York recently for a couple different events. What were you up to?

ALEXANDER CHEE: I was speaking to some people's classes and helping a young person launch a book— a young writer named Jinwoo Chong, who has a great new novel out called Flux, which I think is pretty brilliant. He's a young Korean-American queer writer who is the kind of writer that I am; or he's among the kinds of writers that I've been waiting to show up and, you know, join me in this little niche corner that I'm in. So I was like, let's help the kid out. We got over 140 people in the event, which for a debut novel at The Strand is like… So he was launched, which is good.

BT: Very cool. Excited to check that out. What else are you up to? Are you working on any other projects?

AC: I'm working on two projects right now that I'm pretty frustrated by because I've been working at them off and on, almost for the length of my career. So, part of me is like, all right, it's time to finish these books, because I keep having newer projects kind of emerge and become more important. So they keep getting pushed back. I know there's a certain amount of anxiety about them. One is a novel and one is either going to be a memoir or it'll be a novel. I was thinking about it because I'm also doing this series for Boxwalla where I choose two novels, essentially every month (check it out here). The idea is that it's an American fiction series. [Boxwalla] does this really great international series. They're the only people I think who saw, for example, that it was gonna be Annie Ernaux this year for the Nobel. When they sent out one of her books last year, they had a little note that I reminded them of: “We think she's going to get the Nobel.” Nobody else called that. Everybody else was focused on, you know, all those men…And that's what I like about them. I feel I have a less provincial sense of world literature by subscribing to their series. So, when they asked me to do the American Fiction series I was excited. Then I realized that the two books that I chose for Box Number 4, as it's called, were Elizabeth McCrackens’ The Hero of this Book, and Eugene Lim’s Search History. They're both kind of ways for me to think about approaching the books that I'm writing. Lim’s novel is kind of a metafictional story. It starts out with a story about an artificial intelligence professor that turns out to be written by AI, who goes by the name of César Ira, the experimental writer. 

JACQUI CORNETTA: That’s good.

AC: And then César Aira becomes a character on the page for a while and then vanishes, and then this kind of down and out adjunct professor in Queens shows up…

JC: That’s me! I'm a down and out adjunct professor in Queens. This is too real.

AC: She likes to get high and listen to Death Metal and go to the aquarium. And she's dog sitting for this dog, who this other guy thinks is the reincarnation of his dead friend. And that's just the first 30 pages. It just kind of keeps rolling on like that. It's funny. It's clever and it takes you right up to the painful parts and then jumps away and then comes back. It was fun to think about putting them together, like, what do they have in common? And I guess the answer was grief. Both are technically approaches to grief.

JC: That's so interesting. I feel like César Aira’s such a good choice for a kind of AI-like connection. He writes in one go. He doesn't edit. So I mean, that's perfect. The kind of merging of unconscious-es is both artificial and otherwise…

AC: Lim is a librarian in Queens.

JC: I saw him read recently. It was fabulous. 

AC: The McCracken is more of reluctant autofiction where she wasn't going to write about her mother as a fictional character, but it becomes this way of keeping several different promises to her, as well as to herself. She creates a novel about her mother that's a way of collecting her, so she doesn't lose her in some way, even though, of course, she has lost her. But it starts out very simply; a woman goes to London to take a walk,  a walk that she took with her mother when her mother was alive. That starts into the story of her mother and then the story of her parents and the story of her mother's family, mother's sisters. And it just keeps going like that. It has a very natural feeling to it. There's parts of it, where she is meditating on writing, that I think is weirdly, deeply moving, which is not something that we can say about meditations on writing so often.

JC: It sounds like both of those works are almost kind of poking fun at the line between writing fiction and writing something else. Writing autobiography or writing non-fiction. I find it's interesting that you mentioned thinking about literary worlds outside of the United States. I do find that often in other literary traditions, it's much more common to find that kind of…you wouldn't even call it hybrid, right? You wouldn't even think about it as a transgression of boundaries.  I talked to a friend, who's a translator from Serbian, and she's like, “We don't actually have words to divide between fiction and non-fiction. It's all just literature.” Which I think is so nice. It must be nice to not have people constantly asking you, “Is this real or not?”

AC: I thought about that. I think it was funny to find my essay collection in the “advice section” in a bookstore in New Zealand. I was like, oh no, this is probably not the right section. So, it is interesting to see, I guess, where things end up. For me, I've been thinking about the problem of trying to write about some relatives who are dead and some relatives who are alive, and how it may be that for the thoughts we have about family, a novel may be best, especially when there’s no legal obligation to tell the truth anyway.

JC: Mm-hmm.

AC: I was answering questions in one of the classes that I was visiting in New York. It's one of the questions people always ask: how do you avoid exposing people too much if you're writing about them? And I always remember the advice, which is that, the legal definition or legal standard for libel is, if a stranger can read it and know who they are, then you are in trouble, but if not, then he might be okay. So I guess we'll see what happens. I guess the good news is that I come from a long-lived family. But the book that I'm planning right now is about the way that I've learned about my family through the deaths of relatives where the conversation begins after their death that wasn't happening when they were alive. Right now it’s the idea of the book as a marker for them, made out of paper.

JC: Can't wait to read it.

AC: Thank you.

BT: In the process of how you're making that and the inspiration that goes into it, how do you conceive of those different things that you're writing about? How have you come to develop these new ideas?

AC: Something that I think about a lot is how anything that you feel is an obstacle to the writing, you should make the structure of the writing. As a way of incorporating it and building around it or acknowledging it. One of the books that I'm teaching that does this – I'm teaching a non-fiction course to undergraduates – we're reading Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman, which is a book that she wrote about the problem of writing a biography about Sylvia Plath. So she revisits the major biographies of Sylvia Plath, discusses what each one failed to get at. Then she herself goes and gets it. Which is this kind of annihilating way of approaching the biographies of Sylvia Plath. Thankfully, I have never written a biography of Sylvia Plath and never attracted the attention of Janet Malcolm the essayist. 

JC: Do you feel like that idea of treating something that feels like a problem or an obstacle as the kind of actual place of entrance has been true for all of your writing projects or specific to the ones that you're working on now?

AC: I think it's at least true for the era that I'm in now. Something that I figured out while I was writing an essay of mine that's in the first essay collection essay I wrote in 1999—I was trying to write about someone in a kind of biographical sketch. It's called “After Peter.” The prompt, from Edmond White, was putting together an anthology and he asked a number of us to write about artists that we'd known who died of AIDS and to consider the cultural impact, the loss to the culture, created by their loss. The person I wrote about was someone I had been in love with in a desperate, losing proposition-kind of way, where we hooked up a few times and then went our separate ways in a more or less friendly way. Then years later I discovered that he died and I was heartbroken in a way that surprised me, given how little we'd actually known each other. In that essay there's a line I came up with that I like, which is: in this part of the AIDS epidemic, the minor characters take the story forward cause who else is left? So that was a way of thinking through what right do I have to write about this? Who am I to write about this? He had never really become the artist that I think he wanted to be, as well, which is part of it. The loss is that we don't even get to know what he might have been. How do you calculate that? How do you value that? I think, especially in non-fiction writing… What was the country that you were saying where they don't have the distinction?

JC: Serbia.

AC: Serbia, right. I don't think they have the distinction in a lot of places because I know that the market for an essay collection, per se, becomes a strange category in certain countries, in the sense that the category vanishes. They might still buy the book, they'll just call it something else. The problem is telling stories about the living. I'll tell stories about the dead. That was sort of the approach. 

BT: Somebody in another conversation I was having recently described their anxieties as their friend and having to kind of befriend it, look it right in the face. I love that idea of just facing something or making it the subject. You can go all sorts of ways around it and look at it from different points of view that way, rather than not looking at it.

AC: Right. I think there is an impulse for some people when they're talking about flattening the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. I feel like what they want to do is they want to erase the difficulty, but the difficulty is the thing that's interesting to me. That's part of why I work that way.

BT: Very cool.

AC: Thank you.

JC: I'm guessing students ask you a lot of these kinds of questions, but with these particular projects that you're working on, I'm curious do you have rituals around writing?

AC: I got rid of almost every one of them. The older I get, the less I feel the need. I do have a writing cabin in the backyard.

BT: Wow, beautiful.

AC: When we came to see this house in 2019, we were shopping around and that wasn't even in the listing. It wasn't fixed up either. It had been a yoga platform that they put a roof on and some walls. Then they were calling it the “art shed,” the owners. I saw it and was like, alright, that seals the deal for me. I do try to keep very few things out there, so when I go there, it's a really blank space. If I have a surviving ritual, it's that I like to feel like no one can find me. There's an anonymizing kind of thing, even if I just find a classroom that nobody's using or if I'm in my office on campus on the weekend when nobody's there or at night. If I get on a train anywhere. It's kind of impossible to work on planes unless I write on my phone, which is a new addition to the tools. I realize that people will not interrupt you if you are writing on your phone, which is just really weird.

JC: But they will if you're writing on something else?

AC: If you're on your laptop, somebody will just talk to you.  I don't know why it's true. I just know that it's true. It might be different if you're a woman or a femme. So much of the culture is still struggling to let a woman read by herself and I’m sorry that’s true.

JC: As am I. 

AC: Those are some rituals that I have. I have this nice pen. My husband's dismay about another notebook, because I have so many notebooks. Sometimes I dictate while I'm driving. I'm not sure what was happening, it seemed to have gone away, but there was a period where I could see the idea in my head, but I could not seem to write it, but if I dictated it, I could cross the gap. I don't even know how you would seek treatment for something like that. Maybe there is a doctor who could have helped me during that period, but that was one of my responses to it. That and writing on my phone. 

JC: That makes sense as a way to have a conversation with yourself that doesn't always feel possible in writing. 

AC: In the early days of speech-to-text also, there was a certain sense of, wow, what the hell is this? That's where you would have that felix culpa, the lucky mistake, trying to interpret yourself to yourself. Like a writing prompt game, I guess. I introduce some things to my students periodically where I can't tell if they enjoy them or if they think I'm a witch. I had them do a bibliomancy exercise the other day. The first week of classes, there's always a covid spike. It's kind of a tradition now. So I try to get them out of the classroom if I can. I had them take a notebook and this exercise and go to the library. You just walk around, stand in front of bookshelves, close your eyes, and wait for a book to feel like it's pulling at you. Then you flip it open and look for a quote. Before you go in, you ask yourself, “What am I gonna write about?” Then you find 10 quotes and they are all the answers. 

JC: Oh my god, how could they not love that? I hope that loosens them up.

AC: The thing I like about a library, in person, which I always loved about the card catalog, was finding a thing that you didn't go looking for. You didn't even imagine that it existed. Then you stumble over it and you're like, whoa. I think it's really important to preserve that as an intellectual endeavor.

JC: I teach your essay “The Writing Life” every semester.

AC: Oh, thank you. 

JC: It's really a pleasure. I teach at Queens College CUNY. Students always love it. That specific line always sticks out to them, this idea of finding their place on the shelf. Especially since the pandemic began, my students kind of expect to be able to find all materials, even library materials, online. I think so few of them actually enter the library for something other than sitting in the lobby, you know? 

AC: They're very convinced of the infallibility of the internet, which is one of the first things you have to get them to get over. We have a great subject librarian here, Wendell Cox, that I work with. We do this little game where I ask them to think of something that they feel like they need to research for something they're writing and then to choose the thing that they feel like they're sure they won't find. Then Wendall just takes them through how to find each one. That's sometimes like a game show.

JC: I think you do have to kind of…

AC: To gamify it. He's a good-natured guy.

JC: Love a librarian. I've been doing a lot of listening exercises with my students and kind of making that into a reading approach, because I find that they have no qualms observing the sounds they can hear around them and thinking about the different qualities of the sounds. That feels so much less judgmental or there's less expectations attached to it than there is to reading. That's been really interesting. And kind of getting them back in their bodies after years of being on screens.

AC: I have a colleague who's trying to get our students to read more from their own work at the end of the term which I'm in favor of. But I've been thinking about how much I loved the Moby Dick Readathon in New York City and how much I want to try to figure out a text that we do a readathon of. I wouldn't want it to be Moby Dick again because I feel like that belongs to that era. Something else, but what would that be? 

JC: That's a great question.

AC: I'm the director of the London Foreign Studies Program for our department this fall so I'm trying to create an immersive London experience. I've been trying to think of how to best do that. Because a lot of them think it's gonna be the London of Virginia Woolf or the London of Shakespeare or the London of some other dead writer. I want them to start thinking about the living writers who are there, the way London is different now, the very modern London that we're gonna be meeting is a sort of beat-up version of itself from 10 years ago. 

JC: Yeah.

AC: By which I mean, the pound is 80 cents on the dollar. I remember when it was basically $2. 

JC: That sounds like such a fun, creative project. Hearing you talk about your teaching, there are aspects of teaching that are not creative, but I'm curious how you see being a mentor as feeding into or informing your creative practice.

AC: The thing that I love about the research work that I do with my librarian friend is that the papers that I get, or the essays that I get from my students, all teach me so much about the world. It's great to watch them feel things shift as they take these things in. One of those first students that I had here at Dartmouth just applied for an MFA program and when I was first teaching her in first year writing classes, she was this really talented young woman who wasn't thinking about being a writer. She was really sure it was gonna be geology. And geology is a really cool subject. I don't want to take people away from whatever they think their calling is, but I just felt like she had so much natural talent, you know? So, I just ask them a question: “You thinking about taking more writing classes?” I think a lot of it is just about getting them to think about something that they maybe weren't thinking about, not necessarily in a way where you're saying, what you're doing right now isn't enough. That's not the way to approach it. The way to approach it really is giving them a question, opening a door, a possibility, seeing if they get interested in it. Maybe they don't want it right then? Maybe it's four years later they come to you and they want the letter and they are ready to apply. Then great. That means they thought about it, right? I think the problem with mentoring becomes when you want it more than they do.

JC: Mm-hmm. 

AC: That's the thing that I've had to really watch out for. I cannot want them to be a writer more than they want to be a writer. However great I think it would be if they were, it doesn't matter. They have to think it would be great.

JC: That's wise and important to look out for. I feel like I could ask you so many questions about teaching, but maybe I wanna let Ben ask some questions, too.

BT: I’d like to talk about queerness in general. I know that you're an inspiration to people who read your work and you have spoken kind of about not trying to be a voice for them, but to make room for them and others. You hold a significant place that way. This kind of ties into the mentorship stuff, but I'm curious, in the world that we are living in now, where it can kind of feel like queerness is under attack again in more intense ways than we've seen recently… I'm wondering how you're feeling about finding hope in the world and what work could be done for the community?

AC: What's interesting to me about the ferocity of the anti-trans attacks, for example, is that support for trans people has actually increased in terms of the way the issue polled in the last elections was really not anything that conservative voters were interested in, penalizing trans people. So I really do feel like, what we do see, is we see it as a signal to the kind of attack dogs of the right to commit acts of violence, which they are certainly doing. As a signal, they're not trying to campaign on it. They are trying to pass these laws and so on, that's what they're doing if they get power. They're doing that as a way to ask the people who are the “lone wolves,” to focus their violence on trans and queer people, which is really ugly. I feel like that's a thing that I don't see talked about in the news enough. There's some sort of implicit idea that conservative politicians, in doing this, are doing what the electorate that elected them wants, but this is an electorate that's so gerrymandered that they don't really feel accountable to voters and are acting in whatever way they see fit.

BT: Mm-hmm.

AC: It comes as a result of increased visibility, increased cultural power that we saw. It's an attempt to claw some of that back. So it quickly goes from anti-trans to anti-queer, in an umbrella way, to anti-woman, to anti-contraception, anti-abortion. There's a ladder that it climbs. Which makes the TERF [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism] movement even more puzzling, for the way that it doesn't seem to understand the connection between transphobia, homophobia and misogyny. In terms of what gives me hope, it's always the beauty of our culture, which has grown into this incredible thing. I think what I don't see people acknowledging is how trans liberation, for example, makes a world where their kids can safely question their gender identities. So much focus has been put on the people who might want to change their gender, but there are lots of people who go through the questioning process and are actually like, you know what, this is what I like. I am who I am, but maybe there's some slipperiness somewhere. I should say what I'm talking about is friends’ children, who I've seen go through questioning phases and emerge with a really confident sense of themselves as people. I don't understand how the value of that isn't more evident. Do you really want neighbors calling the police on your house if they see your daughter painting your nails? Because that's where this goes if we keep letting them do this. I remember a demo I was at, a kind of accidental demo, a bunch of us were just going to the amusement park in the nineties. Some of us were drag queens and in drag and some of us were drag queens and out of drag and just had shaved heads because shaved heads make it easier for wigs. The park staff thought we were there to protest them, but we weren't. They didn't wanna sell us tickets, so then we protested them. But what was really funny to me about that was that while that was happening, there were people coming in to buy tickets and posing for photos with the drag queens in our group, who were happy to oblige them. I just thought, wow, everybody loves drag queens, even if you're at Six Flags. I actually do feel like that's true more than not true. The people who seem so afraid of drag queens are faking it. I remember back then we told the park ownership that they should hire our drag queen friends to work at the park because look at how everybody was enjoying it!

JC: That's brilliant.

AC: To sort of personalize what I'm talking about, I went through a period when I was doing drag – and I wrote about this in an essay –  didn't write about all of it. There was a period when I was doing drag. I would go out with my friends. We'd all be doing drag and we'd get the pictures back and it would look like a bunch of drag queens and then this girl who was with them. And that was me. In the photos, I didn't read like I was doing drag. I read like a girl and I thought about it. Was I trans maybe or would I be happier that way? Why did it seem like it was so easy for me to pass? I went through that process without a lot of support. I just kind of did it in my own kind of chaotic, fumbling way. My friend Meredith Talusan has talked about how a lot of trans people who start out passing as queer, passing as a cis person, how they have experiences, like at Halloween that give them these kinds of moments. It's interesting to think about who's doing what at Halloween, what they're learning about themselves and others.

BT: Absolutely. I’ve heard someone call you a “Renaissance man,” Alex.

AC: Well, that's interesting.

JC: How do you feel about that?

BT: Just in reference to all of the different past occupations, jobs, little experiences that you've had. Perhaps before writing or even through that. I have a list here: professional card reader, makeup artist for gay porn, gogo dancer, musician, a wide variety.

AC: Yoga teacher.

JC: Oh, cool. I see that kind of variety of exploring different jobs – sure, they're all jobs, right? They're always to make a buck – but also, they show a certain kind of curiosity and desire to have a sense of play and imagination, even the spirit of drag, alive in your work and in your life. How, in the present, do you keep that spirit of play? 

AC: I suppose I have fewer questions in some ways about what I wanna do. The thing about being a teacher is that you have so many resources at your disposal. Or at least you have the latitude to assess all these different kinds of roles in the teaching of your students. In the meeting that I was just in, I was talking about basically being a projects advisor to students, but also having a role in the host institution, as someone who would participate in a series of lectures,  but then I would also be a kind of presiding faculty member for students over the trip itself. Within the one job of taking them to London, I'll have all these different roles, right? Then I'll also have my own whatever's happening for me as a writer. I know already that I'll do an event at Daunt Books for this new edition of Valentino that Daunt Books is doing that I wrote an introduction for. I'm looking forward to seeing my London writer friends. Maybe what's happened is that I've kind of made room for a life with many roles in it without necessarily openly acknowledging it that way.

JC: Mm-hmm.

AC: One symptom when you're a fiction writer is that you think of a lot of random jobs that you might have. We're always sitting around going like, well, what if I was working on a cruise ship? What if I was a gardener at a Buddhist monastery? That's just really about writing fiction, but you're dressing it up a little bit by imagining it as a job. I'm imagining a job that I might have as a way of legitimizing what feels illegitimate to you, because you haven't yet told yourself that you're a fiction writer.

JC: So appropriate. Now you can say you're a fiction writer and having all of those different hats and experiences. I think that's interesting about being a teacher, being an educator, as a kind of opportunity to play in these different ways. 

AC: It's a very weird kind of show biz, being a teacher. 

JC: I think about it as “clowning,” the art of clown. It’s like a certain amount of performance, but then there's also a vulnerability that almost verges on humiliation.

AC: For sure.

BT: Given this wealth of experiences that you've had, that you've maybe adopted into your life in a way that you're not even processing, that it's there in the system. Is there anything you would like to do next? Any challenges that you're interested in exploring actively?

AC: That's an interesting question. I just had the great gift of a year off from teaching with pay thanks to the Guggenheim and the United States Artists Fellowship.

JC: Congrats.

AC: That was amazing to have. One of the things that I understood  was that I needed mentors, actually. As much mentoring as I do, I also need a mentor. Or mentors. And a few even presented themselves to me and said, “Seems like you need X or it seems like you need someone to have this role in your life.” And I was like, yes. That was exciting. I certainly want to pick up with that. I have all these things that I've dreamed of, which is great, but I know now that I'm in this really cool place where I get to think of what's out past the perimeter of what you dreamed for yourself when you were younger. I think I've just started asking that question, so I don't know what happens next. I have been really gratified by ways that I've given back, like supporting a fellowship for the Lambda Literary Foundation named for the late writer Justin Chin, who was a peer/slash idol of mine back in the nineties and early aughts before he died. My friend Christine and I have been funding this fellowship and trying to keep his name and legacy alive that way. It's always great every year to see the writers discover his work, as well as do their own work at the Lambda Literary retreat that they have every summer. When Jack Jones Literary Arts was doing their retreats, I funded a number of writers, Asian and Asian American women writers who now all have books that have come out of that; Larissa Pham, KatChow, Jennifer De Leon and Sabrina Imbler. All four really fantastic, interesting writers. That was a fellowship that I named for my grandmother on my father's side, Yi Dae Up, who was a calligraphy artist who came to calligraphy late in her life. So I can imagine trying to do more of that. That was the kind of thing that I always thought that I would have to be really rich to do. Then it turned out that I didn't have to be really rich to do it. I just had to be rich enough and that was a beautiful thing to discover. I can imagine getting involved with trying to find a way to do more of that somehow. I know at least the next five or six books that I want to write, so I have to get to those, too.

JC: Wow.

AC: So maybe I'll just do that. Maybe that's the thing that I haven't really dreamed up yet, only doing that. 

JC: It's inspiring to see how you've created so much space for writers and it sounds like you've gotten so much from those relationships. It's very reciprocal and mutual. And yeahSounds like you've got your work cut out for you.

THIS CONVERSATION HAS BEEN EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.