Steven Duong is a fiction writer and poet from San Diego, California. His short fiction has made an appearance in The American Poetry Review, The New England Review, and Guernica.
Duong is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University and was a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, and the Academy of American Poets.
He released his debut poetry collection, ‘At the End of the World There is a Pond’ on Jan. 14. On Feb. 21, he will read from the collection alongside fellow poet Tramaine Suubi at Prairie Lights Bookstore at 7 p.m.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Iowan: Did you know that you were going to be a poet growing up?
Duong: No. I started writing seriously in college. My first poetry class was when I was a sophomore, and my first fiction class was when I was a senior. I come from a family where both my parents were engineers. My brother is like a computer scientist, and I think I had the sense that it was not going to be my bag. Before I wrote poems or fiction, I wrote music. I was a bedroom guitar, like garage band kind of writer.
What role did writing play in your childhood?
I mean obviously my primary exposure to writing poetry growing up was in a diaristic way, like this is my feelings, and I’m writing them in my journal, and I’m closing it and putting it under my pillow. I did have a lot of music in my upbringing. My dad was more of a British invasion, The Beatles person than he was an American music fan. Both my parents immigrated from Vietnam in the 80s and moved to Canada, where I was born. And so, I feel like their references for American media and Western media and music and culture, it’s like very much 80s and 70s stuff. I don’t know that I had a lot of, like, literary influences as a kid.
What is your preferred medium, short stories or poetry and why?
I started writing seriously with poetry. That’s what I encountered first in my undergraduate education. For a long time, when people would ask me what I prefer, I used to say that poetry feels like my home base. That was where my native waters were. Then I venture out into fiction, and I use a lot of my skills from poetry like attention to language and the line and the sentence. I bring that to my fiction, but I don’t know if it feels that way anymore. I don’t necessarily feel devoted to genre so much as I feel devoted to certain forms at certain times. There are so many weird things a story can do.
What was your favorite piece you have ever written in your life and why?
It feels like the last thing I wrote is my favorite thing, and everything else is behind that, I cringe when I read it. In the book “At the End of the World There is a Pond,” there is a poem in there called Tattoo, and it references Swell, a song I wrote when I was a freshman at Grinnell. I feel like I’ve changed so much as a writer and an artist and a person that it’s kind of fun to point out old versions of yourself.
How was your time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
My experience was overwhelmingly positive, and I know that’s not the case for everybody. I met some of my best friends there, who I continue to send work to and whose work I read. I read their work. They are the writers I trust the most to read and understand my work and talk to me about it, I met in Iowa.
The guidance of my teachers has been invaluable. The class size of each year is at least about 25. It seems small but it’s bigger than most MFA programs and so with the cohort that big, you know you’re not going to be besties with 24 people, but you are going to find two or three people who you really trust and admire. You don’t get to see sh*tty drafts, things that are on their way of becoming what they’re supposed to be, but you do get that in graduate school.
That’s really valuable. That’s why it feels worth it to get a hold of drafts, to see people that you really admire, and it’s like their first stab at that thing. Maybe twelve years later, it’ll become like a masterpiece novel or whatever, but you got to see it as like a little zygote like that.