Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer based in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A Best New Poets 2024 nominee, their recent poetry appears in Canthius, Room Magazine, and others. Their first full-length book is forthcoming in 2024 from Metonymy Press. Find them at grckwn.com.
You can read Memoir in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
After I found out about my unplanned pregnancy, I called a friend and talked to him all night, through the morning. Our conversations tend toward the existential and theoretical. Sometime after 4 a.m., he asked about the difference between memoir and autobiography. It wasn’t until weeks after the abortion that I remembered the Ocean Vuong quote after which I titled my Master’s thesis.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
The poetic form was the best fit for this particular piece, but it’s not the only piece in this work. A companion prose piece also emerged from the same source – diary entries from my abortion. On their own, each piece would not have contained what I needed them to contain. Together, they allowed me to not only make sense of my life and experiences leading up to this point, but finally begin to grasp how to parse and express specific thoughts, fears, and traumas that I’ve unknowingly carried for years without shame.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Periods in my life where I have stopped writing and producing content at a manic pace, like right now, having defended my thesis and published my book, are usually periods when I feel the most fulfilled and content.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
I love drawing inspiration from reality TV. Shows like The Bachelor, Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, and more reflect qualities I observe in my own creative tendencies – beating hearts exposed to the air, oxidized and imperfect, free and messy, problematic and human. I’m not interested in rendering these emotional landscapes beautiful. I’m fascinated by the beauty of cheap lust, heterosexual dysfunction, and monstrous jealousy.
What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on my book, Sacred Heart Motel. My first full-length poetry collection will be published by Metonymy Press this fall. I’ve been writing it since I started writing poetry. I never really stop working on anything. Words recite themselves in my head and I revise without being able to help it. I’ll probably keep writing this forever, or until the next book.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
I started writing poetry three or four years ago. I don’t think I knew how much I needed it. For the first two years, scribbling and filling up journals every few months or so and crafting poems in a manic haze became the only way for me to feel understood as an undersocialized grad student in the pandemic who’d never had the support to make sense of the unsayable in everything that makes me. This started with giving shape to things like my intergenerational trauma, then eventually shifted so that I was now mining the richness of my own personhood as it became more visible to me – the good, the bad, the funny, the boring, the pretty, the ugly.