Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
April 1 LITM: Jane Wong
Our next letter in the mail comes from author Jane Wong. Jane’s letter explores how we can write by not writing, be daring in the act of making, and refuse functionality when we create any kind of art.
Jane Wong is the author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City: A Memoir (Tin House, 2023), and the poetry collections How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). An associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University, she grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Jane Wong: So many books. I still sleep with books all around me like little moons. The writers I return to are Lucille Clifton and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Rereading feels expansive – new insight arises from the bottom of the lake. Recent favorites, yes! John Vercher’s Devil is Fine and K-Ming Chang’s Organ Meats.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Wong: I grew up in Chinese American restaurant in a strip mall and the public library was across the street. My mom used to drop me off there for hours (free babysitting!) and I’d read everything. I’d write alternative endings and slip them into books. Growing up in a restaurant, surrounded by so many overheard conversations, sizzling woks, and freezer burnt shrimp, I was always writing stories full of sensory imagination in my head. I was always dreaming up a portal into another world. I ate up every single new word I learned, stuffed it into my mouth like it was taffy. I don’t know if I could have done anything else, which is kind of scary. As someone who is the first in her family to attend college, this writerly path felt like a huge risk.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Wong: In a creative writing class of mine many years ago, I had students write down little prompts on the last day to deliver to each other like valentine’s. I received a prompt that said: “draw your poem.” This is before I started experimenting with interdisciplinary art. I kept returning to that little slip of paper, which I taped on my desk. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with translating my poetry into different mediums – through installation art, papermaking, ceramics, and performance. I’ve eaten my poem before (words cut out of rice paper), made my poem into a table full of bowls, recycled my poem into paper with seeds saved from my mother’s garden. Thinking beyond the page has radically changed my writing practice.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Wong: Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House), a memoir, is my most recent book. The book comes out in April in paperback, which I’m thrilled about. What to say about this weird little book! Oh, it’s a love song for working class immigrants, it’s an ode to my mother who is an icon, it’s about how to make do when you don’t have much. It’s a book that pushes against memoir expectations – and plays with speculative elements. Tonally, I wanted this memoir to be all the feelings. To refuse the gaze of trauma porn, I hope this book is funny as much as it is heartbreaking. I’m pretty vulnerable in this book and I hope that rawness resonates with readers – especially readers who have experienced food insecurity, addiction in their families, and intimate partner violence. I am obsessed with visceral language and I hope the poetry/music in the memoir sings forth.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Wong: My mom is a USPS worker! She’s been working night shift for almost 30 years. The post office holds a dear place in my heart. I have a chapter in my memoir called “Snow, Rain, Heat, Pandemic, Gloom of Night” where I write about how my mom’s coworkers are like her family. They share snacks and life advice! Whenever I’m at the post office to mail something out, I always chat up the clerks and let them know my mom also works for the USPS. One time, this one clerk tried to set me up with her son. She showed me pictures and everything and I was like, uh, I’m 15 years older than him. But she wouldn’t let me go without taking his number. Someone yelled out in line: “just take the fucking number and move!”
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Wong: Yes! These poems by Jai Dulani. I worked with Dulani on these poems as part of his thesis and I love the emotive layers under each image, each line teeming with radical possibility and music: “petal prayer this distance/queer closer please—” So, so good!
