The Flood: Chiwan Choi Talks About His New Poetry Collection, Alien Abductions, Race and Picasso

The Flood: Chiwan Choi Talks About His New Poetry Collection, Alien Abductions, Race and Picasso LA-based poet, novelist, playwright, independent publisher and teacher Chiwan Choi*, author of the recently released poetry collection The Flood (Tía Chucha Press, $15.95), told me that ten years ago, he self-published his first book, dogfuzz on the asscrack/time out of space, because he “decided he needed money to eat.” As mind-blowingly naive as that sounds, Choi managed pull it off. His story goes something like this: “I, along with my friend, were driving around with bunch of used CDs in the trunk, trading them in for lunch money. Anyway, my family knew a family who owned a printing place. My parents had introduced the couple years back and set them up on a date and they got married and had kids, so they always owed us! I took the book to them and got 100 perfect-bound books made for like $200 and then I sold them for $10 each.

When I was out of cash again, I decided I needed to make another book. This time, because I had NO money, I actually presold it, before I even had the book written. I told some bullshit story I don’t even remember anymore. I think I presold like 50 copies, so I had the money to make the books. Once I had the money, I had to make the book. I started thinking about tackling something that I hate, which is the love poem. So I decided to write fucked-up love poems, and they turned my next book, lo-fidelity lovesongs.”

Selling books from your car, and making enough money from those books to eat something—hell, anything—sound like literary urban legends, but it really happened, and it’s Choi’s, um, hunger, that got him where he is today, and will get him wherever he’s going.

The Flood is the product of almost ten years of work. It’s a fantastic collection, born from Choi’s need to examine and understand the forces at work in his world. The Flood is broken into three sections; the first two, “the dim light i hold in my cupped hands” and “damsel and plastic and blue blanket winters,” are comprised of shorter poems that explore the fantastic amidst the mundane. The last, “speak to god in accents,” is a single, seventy + page piece, the flood, which flows over the page and takes you to wild, unexpected and desperate places.

In addition to his new collection, Choi, along with his wife Judeth Oden, runs Writ Large Press, a small, independent press which publishes LA writers and hosts events throughout the city. Choi also runs poetry and fiction workshops and edits the various things that come his way.

Chiwan and I recently had a very long conversation via IM. I had a lot of questions about his new book and Writ Large, and he was kind enough to answer them. *Disclaimer: Chiwan and I are totally friends. I’m even friends with his wife. I met them in a writing class in LA a million years ago. They’re the best (the best writers and the best people).

Alright, let’s get this started.

Lets.

How long were you working on the material in The Flood?

It’s just about 10 years of work. “the flood” (the long piece) took about that long. I wrote the other pieces during that time. The first poem, “Architecture,” is from 2008, and it’s the newest one. I put it at the beginning of the book because the last stanza (below) captures how I feel about finishing any project—that I don’t quite know how it reached the point it did, how I never planned the end to be the end, how I write in a way to figure out what it is that I do.

i get up and walk to the bar,

turn back to see her cross her legs,

the left over the right,

smile

as she waves,

and i pour it full

with thick red wine

made with young grapes

and blood of bulls.

i take a sip

and walk out on a bridge,

look down at the house i have built,

the work of my hands

that remains beyond

comprehension.

Ten years is a really long time. Do you feel your writing style and/or “preoccupations,” were pretty consistent? Were you ever worried that you or your work would change make the collection work coherently?

Yeah, I was worried it was taking too long. I traveled so much, reading new writers and learning new things and experiencing life changes, but reading it recently, I’ve felt there is a coherence in the progression, if not the style.

Did you produce other significant work during that time that you didn’t include?

There’s a lot of good stuff that I didn’t put in to the book (a lot of bad stuff too). The good stuff I left out because I didn’t think it fit.

Were you always revising, or were you able to keeping moving forward? Was there a huge revision when you were getting ready to send out the manuscript?

I did a huge revision before sending it out. I was trying to edit so many poems and looking at them so closely, at the lines and such, and fixing them and fixing them until I stepped back and realized that I was editing stuff that should be cut out altogether. Fucking hell

How did you proceed one you decided you were ready?

I got lucky because a publisher had seen my work before and wanted the manuscript, so I didn’t have to send it out to multiple people. He actually wanted it 3 years earlier, but I totally choked. I thought, “Great! I’ll just finish this long piece,” and then when I couldn’t I gave up and didn’t even contact him. Then a couple of years later a mutual friend was talking to the publisher and he mentioned that he still would like to see my manuscript. I contacted him and he gave me a deadline, so that got me going. I finally finished my long piece and edited the manuscript together.

So publishing the book was actually much easier than writing it. Did you ever wish you’d explored what other options/offers might be out there?

Let me start by saying that I think lot of poetry publishing is bullshit. I’m dealing with students who are being “published,” but it’s borderline scams. Some of the most well-regarded publishers sort of want writers to bring in the funds, so I wasn’t disappointed to not get a chance with any of them.

My big dilemma was that I own a publishing company. What do I benefit from getting published by someone else? I realized that I’d make less money by not publishing it myself, but that’s not a big deal because writing poetry for money is just stupid—you’re just asking to starve to death.

The deciding factor was that I respect my publisher, Tía Chucha Press, and the man who runs it, Luis Rodriguez, so much. Luis was a literary hero to many of us growing up and writing in LA. It felt good to find validation from someone I’d looked up to for so long. I also think that it was important for me to get published by someone else because I have been so insular in my writing career. I think it broke a personal barrier.

Can you elaborate on the “scam”/bring the money” aspect of poetry publishing? That seems unique to the genre.

Well, one poet (who is awesome) that I’ve been working with had her chapbook accepted for publication. She signs a deal that says, I don’t know, 250 copies will be printed or something. They create some fake award (they’re a non-profit like so many publishers) and name her the winner to give her some cash. And then they make her pre-sell her books, which she has no desire to do, and then when the pre-sale doesn’t meet some number, they say we’re only going to make 100 copies.

The other example, with a “respected publisher,” is they ask authors to actually write grants so the publisher can get money to publish their book.

How does it work with your publisher? Did you get an advance?

Nope, but I get a cut of the sales, and that’s fine. I always joke, “I’ll make dozens of dollars! DOZENS!!!” I don’t fret about the money from the book—I think about what it can lead to as far as more people wanting to take my class, or being interviewed or meeting more artists or whatever.

I’m booking readings and such, and my publisher’s supposed to be handling reviewers/awards, but he’s been on a book deadline himself (with Simon & Schuster).

How does it feel to be a published (by someone other than yourself) writer?

It feels great. There hasn’t really been a negative except for the part where I’m terrified about having to write something new. What’s funny is how people’s view of you changes from literally the day before you had your book and the day when your book is out. Even people who’ve known you forever look at you differently, like “Hey, there goes a writer!” Before it was, “must be nice to sit at home and not work.”

Talk about Writ Large. Starting an independent press is almost a ridiculous as being a poet…

After the whole Wednesday (a now defunt LA lit mag) experience, good and bad, Judy and I decided to give publishing a try because we love collaborating with other artists. Our first book was Kim Calder’s poetry collection, Who’s to Say What’s Home. I met her when she was a teenager and I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to publish her one day.” Ten years later, I did.

Our next book was Aaron Henne’s playwriting exercise book, You Already Know. He’s a local playwright and teacher. This summer, we’re hoping to put out another book of poetry, by Jade Shames. We have four writers finishing their manuscripts right now. We sort of sought them out because we knew what they were working on, but I’m a bit worried because they’re all white.

Did you guys start the press with the thought of supporting nonwhite writers (among other thoughts), or is this something that’s just come up recently?

We didn’t have a goal as far as race/ethnicity, but we are Los Angeles and local publishing should be more diverse. I think what happened is, at the time we started, there were a handful of writers who were working on things that we loved and they were all white. So since we put out only one book a year it feels like we’re publishing only white writers. I’m starting to feel weird about it and I’m not exactly sure how to address it.

I think it’s completely valid to pursue writers and work because they or it is under-represented. It’s a matter of access, and just breaking ingrained habits. I’m female, and I see myself privileging male authors sometimes just because they’ve been published more widely and they’re always right there.

Totally.

How do you pay for publishing, and how do you pay your writers?

We pay for publishing ourselves. Writers get 50/50 split, 25 copies of book, no advance. We generally print 250 copies in the first run. We had to eat a lot of cash recently because the printing Aaron Henne’s book got screwed up

Moving on, or back, race and identity are very present in your work. How has it factored into your writing and writing career, if at all? Is it something you’re conscious of?

More and more every day. I didn’t realize that when I was writing about my father and how I didn’t know how to be a father because he hadn’t taught me methods, I was really writing about race. I was writing about him passing down his race to me, and how he didn’t know how to show me how to be Korean, because nobody does, you know?

I know some people are weirded out by how I write my parents. In my writing they speak perfect English, but they don’t in real life. Once I was meeting with a Korean woman from the Korean community center here and she said I didn’t write Korean enough. That pissed me off, but when I got to NYU my white classmates were telling me I should/could only write Korean characters and put it up for only Korean audiences, and that also pissed me off.

Outside of writing, I have been very outspoken about race, but writing-wise it was never interesting to me until I couldn’t crack the long poem. While I was working on it I figured out that race and me are not separate things, but I’d avoided it because I didn’t want to get pigeon holed as an “Asian writer” (I still don’t, whatever that means).

What are you working on now?

I’m supposed to have rewritten my play by now, and I’m hoping to get to it. I know what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it, I just haven’t done it.

I’ve been working on a poetry collection, but in a way I haven’t before. I’m using alien abductions and the apocalypse to track personal tragedies. I was frozen after getting news about publication; I started freaking out and then somehow started reading this South American UFO blog and thought about how my parents taught me about aliens when I was like 3 years old. The abductions, etc. are an allegory. It’s about faith and how my family functions through dreams and prayer and things we can’t see.

I recently wrote something, a weird journal like thing, that has me excited more than anything. I want to write a novel in the next year and this journal entry will be where it ends. It started out as my current mistrust of language, but it’s about characters trying to replace the language they have with new rules.

What did you learn working on The Flood?

What I realized while I was writing The Flood is that I really, really don’t care about subjects. I end up just writing about the same thing over and over again because I don’t want to spend energy trying to think of new things to write. That’s why there are the same images of my family throughout the book.

I finished the long poem when I realized it really was about one image, about seeing my dad in the kitchen, where he was washing dishes, through the backyard window. I just keep attacking the same thing with slight shifts to see how things change. I am fully there now, but I think it started creeping in through this period.

What do you mean “fully there now?” Now that you’ve made the realization you’ll take that approach on purpose?

Yeah. When we were in Madrid, I got really inspired by Picasso, by the daily sketches he did while painting Guernica. He painted the same face over and over again, every day, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do as a writer, just write the same face over and over see how it changes and see what the changes do.”

Do those different versions lead up to a “master” or do they all have the same weight? Was Picasso practicing, working toward the perfect (“right”) image of this man—something he’d recognize when he saw it—or was it a desire to continue working on the same thing just because doing it once, and maybe correctly, wasn’t satisfying enough? I guess I’m interested in process vs. product here.

I think the process is the “master” of it. I don’t think one has more value than the other, just that I wanted to, and was able to, exhaust the possibilities. It’s a strange paradox. I’m terrified of becoming a writer who writes the same thing, so I attack that by writing the same thing; weird.

Years ago I went to a Basquiat show when I was in the middle of writing the fucking long piece, and I told a friend who was with me, “That’s what I want to write,” pointing at a painting.

Looking back, I don’t think that’s what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know and still don’t know how to express to myself or what it is that I want, so I keep trying. That’s writing for me, to keep at it so I can go “Hmmmm, not that either.”

The full text of Choi’s “architecture” is below:

architecture

i have taken to building in my sleep,

starting with small things—

a shelf for all my elephants,

four-feet wide and a foot deep,

with four legs six-inches tall,

a dining room table,

a new engine for my car.

today

i have built a mansion—

ten stories high,

stairs,

walkways,

bridges,

up and down and

sideways,

connecting everything to everything.

there are people in my architecture.

they walk in and out

of all the rooms.

i sit in the smallest room

with the comfortable green couch

as a woman tells me

of a song about a boat

that she used to listen to.

and holding my empty glass,

i tell her that i know that song

and sing out the lines about

the monkey taking his wife overboard.