Returning to the Self: A Conversation with Truong Tran

“I have written myself out of silence and back into existence,” Troung Tran writes in his memoir, How to Exi(s)t (City Lights Books, 2026). With every word, Tran breaks the silence that marked his experience as a teacher in academia witnessing the discriminatory and performative practices of the institution. He interrogates the silence that insisted on the condition of living a lie in order to sustain a livelihood, the familiar kind of self-censorship and erasure that leaves us unrecognizable even to ourselves. In confronting this deadly silence, Tran not only recounts the challenging and frustrating moments of his life, but also the profound witnessing of love, healing, and a much-needed homecoming to oneself. 

Written in a lyrically captivating style, these essays offer sincere and tender meditations on writing and teaching, imagination and memory, family and childhood, and all the layers and beauty of a complicated identity. I picked up this book expecting a memoir in its barest sense, and yet what Tran offers is a poetic sensibility that marks everything he writes. There’s no separation of poet and memoirist but instead, and more richly, an astonishing blend of both genres. It is easy to praise Tran’s faithful weaving of poetry and prose because every word and imagery grounded me in its seamless world.

I had the pleasure of connecting with Truong Tran via email to discuss the attempt of writing an essay, the weight of shame and hiding, and writing from a place of inquiry, uncertainty, and hope.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Rumpus: I should start by saying how easy it was for me to read your memoir, and it is not because the subjects you engage with are light; they are everything but that. I think there’s something about the essay format, the brevity of it, the simplicity of your language, and how you remained faithful to the form ’til the very last page. Can you tell me the story of how this started, this move to write prose and to structure your memoir as a series of essays?

Truong Tran: I recently started teaching composition in the form of first-year writing. I’ve been a creative writing professor for over twenty years, but circumstances have changed, and I find myself now teaching the essay in a new world. The essay itself is an attempt, and with this notion of an attempt, there are both successes and failures. I wanted to convey this to my students, and thus, I wanted to explore it for myself. I see each and every one of these essays as an attempt at getting to something beyond what is on the page. So, essentially, this book as a whole is an attempt to dislodge the many memories and experiences tucked away in my body, sometimes hidden from myself. I think that many of these attempts end in failure, but giving that failure a voice and an existence on the page and in the world feels important to me. And thus, the arrival of this book.

To be very honest, I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I set out to document an attempt at living through these times. And my editor, Garrett Caples, pointed out to me that what I had done was to write a memoir. It was a surprise to me at first to hear him say that, but it was one that was welcomed because it felt like he had opened up a whole new world to me: the world of sentences and paragraphs and stories. It brought me back to the love of language. That sounds strange for me to say, given the fact that I’ve been a writer almost my whole adult life. But somewhere along the way, I lost something in the act of writing. This book was an attempt at finding that which was lost.

Rumpus: “What is an attempt if not writing that tries and what is writing if not the acknowledgement of failure,” you write in “On the essay as a failed attempt.” At what point did you start to think of writing in terms of giving yourself permission to fail?

Tran: I’m fifty-seven years old. I’ve been rejected as a writer throughout my career. When I interviewed for a tenure-track position, a white man on the hiring committee was quoted as saying in documents that “Truong is a nice guy, but he’s just a poet.” I devoted my life to becoming a poet, only to have the white guy who’s a poet say on record that I was “just a poet.” Why am I stating this now? Because somewhere in this memory is the reality of failure. It is a failure of the imagination. Is this on me or does this belong to the guy who cannot or refuses to see me? 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this book is my attempt to be me in all ways. Me and my successes and my failures. Me owning up to a lifetime of chasing whiteness in the academy, and me accepting myself in all my imperfections and being. It’s who I am. And I think I’m tired of hiding.

I hid as a brown boy in a white world. I hid as a gay man while surrounded by a straight world. And I hid as a person struggling with dyslexia while somehow making a life for myself as an English teacher. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I struggled to read throughout my life. In fact, I dreaded it. And yet, my life’s work is to write. The incongruence of all of this is still something I am trying to make sense of for myself. I’m not sure if that answers your question about giving myself permission to fail. Perhaps failure was hidden in the very act of hiding, if that makes sense.

Rumpus: It does. When I came across lines like, “When this book comes out, if it comes out…” and “there is a likelihood that this may not come to fruition,” I was amazed that I was privy to that detail. Here I was, holding the book in my hands, evidence that it did come to fruition, and yet, I was simultaneously aware of the real doubts and uncertainties that existed in the making of the book. Also important to note is what’s left unsaid—your showing up even when you were unable to envision a book in the world, real readers engaging with your words. 

Tran: As a poet, I’ve always written with the idea that I’m writing to an audience of one, that being myself. So these are conversations that I’m having with myself, and it is perhaps where most of my doubting exists. If I can’t be honest with myself, who can I be honest with? And thus my reasons for keeping those kinds of statements intact.

I don’t have any illusion that this book will speak to the masses. I’ve never written for the masses in that way. I think what I try to do with my writing is to be very intimate. It is a conversation between one and the other, or one and the self. This book feels like that for me. At times, I’m writing to my mother. Other times, I’m writing to a very specific individual. But most often, I’m writing to myself. I’m trying to find a way through. I’m trying to arrive. I’m trying to create an exit strategy.

I want to be clear that when I say “exit strategy,” I’m not talking about ending life. I’m talking about finding an end to the conditions that define one’s life. And in that way, it is a struggle to find one’s freedom, if that makes any sense.

I should also say that I’m struggling to respond to these questions, not because I do not like them or because I feel probed by them. I think they are incredibly engaging, but I also think that they fill me with a sense of dread, similar to that sense of dread that I experience when I have a book in front of me. I find myself paralyzed by language more often than not, and yet here I am, engaged in an interview in which I am supposed to be the writer. These are feelings that are not resolved in me. They’re feelings that sometimes haunt me, but they are also the realities of my existence.

Rumpus: I feel both concerned and grateful for you in agreeing to speak with me, Truong. I, too, felt some trepidation in thinking about what was safe to ask, and what wasn’t. Your first book, Book of the Other (Kaya Press, 2021), is written as a metaphor because you were afraid. There’s less fear here, or at least, less hiding in these essays. Can you describe how different it felt writing from this place?

Tran: I actually wrote Book of the Other in an effort to break from the metaphor. Because you’re right, I did see the metaphor as a way of hiding. And it occurred to me that the hiding was not just something that I was doing, but that those I was trying to confront in my writing also found a way to hide in the metaphor of my writing. It was as though I gave them enough room that they could choose not to see themselves.

Book of the Other wanted to do the work of freeing myself from the luxury of metaphor, of freeing myself from the timidity of metaphor, and perhaps even the cowardice of metaphor. This is when someone will read my statement and push back and question the validity of my position. So I’m just going to say that this is mine and mine alone, in terms of how I see myself in relationship to the metaphor.

In How to Exi(s)t, I was trying to return to myself. I was trying to write a book that was less about confrontation and more about reflection and meditation. I wanted to sit with the moments that make up a lifetime. Is it free of conflict? Absolutely not. Is it free of anger? Absolutely not. But I would like to think that it is, perhaps, a quiet and gentle endeavor.

Rumpus: You kept your diagnosis of dyslexia undocumented for fear that it might be used against you as a teacher. I wonder how it has, to the contrary, served you and your students in the classroom.

Tran: I was not a very good student because of my dyslexia. To be very honest, I struggled greatly in the classroom all through high school. My GPA was awful, and as such, I didn’t really have aspirations to go to college.

My father decided to play a Jedi mind trick on me and suggested to my mother that I enroll in trade school. This came from the man who had just put his older son on an airplane to go off to medical school to become a doctor. It really pissed me off when my mom conveyed his idea. So I woke up the next morning, took the bus to the local community college, and enrolled.

For the next two years, my father drove me to the bus stop every day to get to college, and then I transferred to UC Santa Cruz, where I continued taking English and creative writing classes because they were the only kinds of classes that would allow me the opportunity to interpret, imagine, and make up meaning. Yes, I made up the meaning to the narratives that I could not comprehend.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I believe that being a bad student, in fact, made me a good teacher. Because some part of me knows what it’s like to struggle in the classroom. I see myself sitting right there along with my students, those wanting to speak but [who], for some reason, just can’t find the voice to speak. That was me in the classroom, and those are the students that I want to reach as a teacher.

Rumpus: I am only approaching my third year of teaching and one of the things I often wonder about is whether I’ll survive academia, if it won’t eat me alive someday. The more I come to understand the demands of the work, the more I see clearly how it takes over one’s life, and of course, there’s the performativeness and imposter syndrome that gnaws at many of us in the field. What can you share about the turning point of deciding to walk away from an academic career? I don’t suppose it was an easy choice…

Tran: Let me begin by acknowledging the importance of this question. And let me say also that I walked away from a life as an academic in a political sense, but I am still very much a teacher, and I still teach at a university. But I couldn’t care less if I was teaching in an MFA or if I am teaching first-year writing. The importance of this endeavor is that I am teaching. I am in the presence of my students, and I believe in the work that I do as a teacher.

Everything you’ve stated in your question is real, and everything you’ve stated has also been devastating in my own existence within the space of academia. I remained silent for so many years because I thought I had to maintain my silence to be able to do the work that I love as a teacher. But how do you stand in front of a room full of students, encouraging them to take ownership of their voice, while you yourself exist in silence because you are afraid that speaking out would cost you the thing that you love most, which is teaching?

And how do you resist the performance of otherness when that is what is expected of you from the very place where you are teaching? I wanted to be an academic so bad. I wanted to be a tenured professor so desperately that I failed to see that the performance of my otherness was done in the service of whiteness, the white academy. In terms of imposter syndrome, what can I say to you to convince you to put that down? That sense of shame, it is not yours to carry. It was put on you. So put it down.

Rumpus: Thank you, Troung. This memoir holds many questions too. Is anger necessary and how does one recover? How do we let it go, put it down? In “On racism and the imagination,” we sit with these questions: “What is there to imagine? A world erased of racism? Is this possible? Am I capable?” What questions have you been asking these days? How has this way of curiosity and inquiry changed the way you see and move through the world?

Tran: I don’t think this has always been my philosophy as a writer. But in my most current state of mind, I believe that I’m writing to understand something that I’ve yet to attain an understanding of: human greed, racism, violence, lack of kindness. We see this all the time, and perhaps we think we know the root cause of all of these afflictions. But I still find myself struggling to understand why it happens, why we do the things that we do.

In all my years of teaching, I can honestly say that it comes down to one question, and one word, for that matter. That word is why. Why are you the person to write what it is that you are writing? Why is this important? Why does it matter? Why do we care?

I think that writing is the act of asking questions and the attempt at arriving at answers.

Rumpus: Very often these questions are grounded in your own experiences and acute observations. The essays seem to be in constant conversation with the world. What kinds of art and artists did you engage with as you wrote these essays? What new thing has captured your attention of late?

Tran: I have this way of working that translates into an act of meditation, although I’ve never really sat still to meditate. But I have a belief that if I do something enough and make it a practice, whatever it is that I’m working on will transcend into something different.

During the pandemic, I made a light sculpture a day for 100 days. I made it in the dark, using objects found around the house. And at the end of each night, I turned on the light, I took a picture of it, I wrote a short response to my own creation, and I posted both the image and the writing on social media. It became a thing that people expected to see, and it became a practice that fostered interaction with the community.

I think I mentioned that I wrote poetry for an audience of one, and that this book, in some ways, has the intimacy of writing to an audience of one. But as I grow older, I’m also acutely aware of the importance of making your connections within a community.

I’m also fifty-seven and can proudly say that I’ve articulated my loneliness to others on more than one occasion. That is not something that I would have done in my thirties or even my forties, but at fifty-seven, I both relish my solitude and wallow in the reality of loneliness. I don’t think that’s sad. I just think that’s a reality that many of us exist with.

And so my companions become my art and my writing and the people I meet along the way who share that interest in art-making and writing. In my book, I wrote about a very special human being I met at the artist residency. I still keep in touch with her from time to time. But I do believe I found a lifelong friend, or perhaps a better word to describe her is a comrade, because of what we shared and what we experienced in the space of that residency.

I’ve been really interested in clothing as of late—clothing as a form of expression, and clothing as art—partly because I’m running out of room in my house to create objects that take up space. Clothing is worn. It moves through the world with me, in it, and it is perhaps the most outward form of expression for me currently.

Rumpus: Can you paint me a picture of the garden you started during the pandemic? What’s blooming now? What has gardening taught you? 

Tran: This was the last question, and believe it or not, it is the most difficult question to answer, and perhaps the most triggering. It’s not your fault. This seems to be a lighthearted question, but the truth is, so much of that garden that I’ve described in the book is dead or dying. It’s been neglected.

That place that I loved so much, that I cared for so much, was a place that I walked away from so that I could walk back out into the world. It occurred to me just the other day that I have this way of existing where something in me has to die in order for something else to live and thrive.

During the pandemic, the garden was born out of isolation and loneliness. It was my sanctuary. And then the pandemic ended, and I slowly crawled out of my isolation and walked myself back into existence. I walked myself out of the isolation, but also out of the silence of existing. And I found that I liked living out in the world.

It began with long walks, and then conversations began happening in the neighborhood. I began walking into stores, talking to the people who worked there, and slowly building a sense of community around me. I live on Haight Street in San Francisco. It is a haven for all things vintage and recycled. Those stores became places where I returned, where conversations continued, and where relationships began to form. I began buying clothes, sewing, remaking, and reworking that which came before. I found life in this new form of creation, and some part of me relinquished the garden.

Today, I’m almost ashamed of walking back into that garden. That sounds dramatic, but yes. I look back there and I see neglect. That was of my doing. But you asked the question, and so I’m giving you as honest an answer as I can muster up in this moment.

But I’m also doing this with the promise to myself that I will come back to that place. I will bring new life to it. I just hope that I don’t have to kill some other part of me to give life to these plants and trees. And here we are. Is this the shame that I’ve been talking about? It is of my own doing. So I’ll carry it for now.

But thank you for asking the question. Not an easy one to answer, but in some ways, it’s bringing me back to myself in a way that is necessary.