JINJIN XU, AUTHOR OF THERE IS STILL SINGING IN THE AFTERLIFE
The Light Bulb is an interview series by The Lumiere Review. We’ve interviewed several authors of chapbooks to shed some light on the process of finding inspiration, drafting, revising, and publishing a chapbook. We believe in amplifying a diverse range of writers in the ever-expanding literary scene through this series. For writers who have their eyes set on publishing a chapbook, we hope that these conversations can bring you one step closer to a completed manuscript or a home with a press.
This time round, we have JinJin Xu, winner of the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize for her book There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife. Support JinJin and her work by ordering a copy here.
I. MOTIVATION
First thing’s first, what got you motivated to write your debut chapbook, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife?
Up until the chapbook’s publication in November, I could hardly imagine the poems together as a book. Rather, these poems were the accumulation of two years of obsession during my MFA. I thought I was writing the same poem over and over, and I did not want to publish them as individual poems because I felt there was still more to be said. But during the boredom of quarantine, I decided to put the poems into one big document, when I stepped back, the shape in its wholeness emerged.
Could you elaborate on the themes, arcs, and/or trajectories that define There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife?
The journey of these poems is mapped to the years of grief, friendship, life, and growing at the time of my writing. I think the hardest thing is perhaps to allow the poems to lead me to where they want to go. There are two poems at the center of the chapbook written for my friend’s sister after my friend’s passing—they took two years to write, as the poems kept transforming alongside our friendship.
What keeps you going when you lose the willpower to continue writing and drafting?
I take a break and allow myself to rest. I read, watch films, love those around me, swim. I try to get my sleep schedule back on track so that when I am awoken, naturally, by the light, I feel brave enough to fall into the stirring of language again.
II. EXECUTION
Tell us about the way you sequenced the poems in your chapbook. What are some tips on finding a satisfactory order?
For me, the opening poem and the end poem were intuitive choices. I think of it like cinema, the feeling in the first scene when the curtains draw back. After that, I group poems together, some side by side, some providing emotional context for later poems.
Trusting my intuition is always the hardest thing. I force myself to turn everything on its head, read the order backwards. I throw it around to randomize room for surprises, for things to go wrong.
Often, I will return to the initial, intuitive structure, but something new emerges from the attempt to encounter the manuscript anew and with foreignness.
What’s your writing process like?
I’m always grappling for more ritual in my writing process, which is hard because I am not a routine person. But, on rare good days, I wake up and reach my notebook before getting distracted by small urgencies: errands, emails, to-do lists, fragments of grief, that singular morning hunger. Eventually, the morning bravery wears off & I open the words of Li Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, Bhanu Kapil — fall into another’s language until I can hear my own again. During the pandemic, I returned home to my Shanghai childhood home, and when I find myself getting too comfortable in English, I turn to the Chinese epic, Dreams of the Red Chamber, to the echoes of this house, this city, this language to unbalance my poems, to knock my words into an unfamiliar realm.
Do different poems play separate roles in your chapbook? Do they drive the storyline, serve as transitions, or converse directly with the audience?
Perhaps I think more narratively than poets are supposed to, because I arrived at poetry through fiction and film. In many of my poems, there is a sense of a story I want to tell, and characters I want the reader to meet. There are two longer, “To Red Dust,” sections in the chapbook, one near the beginning, and one near the end. I guess both are sites of immersion into the world of my poems, joints of narrative urgency and tension and dwelling. Without meaning to, I think there is a bit of doubling and recurrence in my work, and I hope those echoes can hold the reader too.
III. REVISION
Writing’s one thing, but editing is a whole other domain. Once the first draft is complete, what are some suggestions on transitioning into revision?
“The first draft is complete” feels like a paradox to me because my first draft rarely feels complete, and it is hard for me to delineate between drafts because they bleed into one another. What I mean is—I am a compulsive editor and the editing process is continuous and ongoing. I edit for many weeks, months, sometimes years—I believe having faith in the editing process is how the heart of a poem is revealed. Rarely is the first attempt in the direction the poem wants to go.
Could you share what your revision routine/process is like?
When editing, the poem becomes so familiar that I can hear its transitions and rhythm and pitter-patter in my brain. The hard part is tearing myself away and forcing it to become unfamiliar again. The whole process is like an exercise in defamiliarizing and reacquaintance, like with an old friend. I am also debilitatingly nostalgic, and I have a hard time throwing anything away. Whenever I find myself trapped in a draft feeling too attached, having a hard time deleting or revising lines, I copy and paste the poem, scroll down to a new page in the document, and begin again there.
How do you know when you’re ready to move on from editing to publishing?
I never feel ready, and before the creative drain of quarantine, I didn’t really submit my writing anywhere. I believe there shouldn’t be such a rush or emphasis on publishing—because we poets have tender egos, and it is already hard enough to write and live outside of the gaze of others. I think being involved in publishing too soon influences the way I write, creating a monotonous voice, and sucks the hope and fun out of the process.
IV. PUBLICATION
Where can we start when looking for chapbook presses?
I look to poets I admire—usually I’ve read their full length before finding out about their chapbook— and read both to see how they moved from one to the next. Similarly, I find it meaningful to submit to journals that have published poets and poems I admire.
Do you have any words of advice on submitting manuscripts to these presses?
Read chapbooks and full-lengths, get inside their flow. I try not to submit before I feel ready. Once I submit, I forget about it. I work on my next project. Do not be caught up on the perfection of one project and try not to stake the value of your work on these so-called competitions and prizes. A new project may bring fresh eyes to your past projects.
Following an acceptance from a press, what are the next steps?
Sit with the manuscript. Put it away. Show it to friends. Listen carefully to their advice, incorporate it, then forget about it. Print out the poems and move them around many, many, many times, even in ways you know is wrong. Start backwards. Trust your intuition, try not to doubt yourself too much. Once you hear the poems singing together, let them go—
JinJin Xu is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Prize. Her work has appeared in The Common, Narrative, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and has been recognized by prizes from Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Press, and fellowships from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and NYU. Her debut, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize.
Instagram and Twitter: Social media handle: @jinxshoe
Website: jinjinxu.com
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.