I hope that you enjoy today's offering, brought to you by the Academy of American Poets.

Independence Day.

I set out in the blue American night, the stupid sparkler raised in my fist, electroshocked dandelion.

Smoke columns over the sock factory, giving the moon that Inus blur.

No, we're not falling.

Things are just floating back where they belong.

The brushstroke of seafoam in the painter's dream as he lays in bed, dying.

Why did you decide not to change her name?

I wanted the history attached to that name, um, to be felt and marked.

Um, to me, I lived with a woman named Grazina Vircelis.

She was a refugee from Lithuania fleeing Stalin.

She lived in Richmond Hill, uh, which at the time after World War II was a Lithuanian community.

Now it's a Guyanese Caribbean community.

And I lived there while going to school at the end, very end of the A train.

[laughs]

... and how really this is an American story.

Oh, 100%.

I think...

Well, you know, you have the quintessential Americana, white picket fence.

Particularly from Connecticut, you have the John Cheevers, you know, this...

And I love those writers just as much as anybody.

But it seems like around post-World War II America, arising at the same time as the upper middle class experiment of institutionalizing creative writing in the MFA program, I say this as an MFA teacher myself, um, you kind of create...

[laughs]

Can you tell us about your mother?

Yeah, it's ha- it's, it's a challenge, um, as an artist, 'cause for me, it's important for me to tellOf my experience- Mm-hmm ... of my mother.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm ...

but not tell her story.

Mm-hmm.

Right? It's not...

Could you tell us about that night and maybe just what it was like to experience this mother-son relationship, particularly so tied with your work as well?

For those who haven't, haven't read it yet, what is it about?

Well, uh, it starts with a young man who's standing on the edge of a bridge contemplating jumping, and he's stopped by an 82-year-old woman with dementia, and they end up living together, um, in the course of a year.

And I think suicide is a very deeply personal subject for me.

I lost my uncle when he was just 28 years old.

I was 24.

He was like a brother to me.

And I, I think at the core of it, uh, suicide is still an act of hope.

[laughs]

It's his first since the death of his mother from cancer in twenty nineteen, and that's where we started our conversation, that most universal kind of loss that is so different for each of us.

I think for me it was, it was hard to believe that someone could vanish.

Um, you know, the, the, the worst moment for me came actually two years after she was gone, and w-- I realized what many people have already realized was grief is not linear.

And I thought I had it all figured out.

I was so smug in my, in my healing that I thought, you know, two years gone, I, I can-- I'm teaching again.

I'm writing.

And then one day I woke up in the middle of the night, two in the morning, and I thought, "Oh God, I gotta tell my mom this thing." I had this brilliant idea I wanna tell her, and I get out of bed.

Where do you think we see that most vividly in this particular collection?

Mm-hmm.

The first flag I ever saw in my life was a Puerto Rican flag, hung, uh, o- on a dash with a, a pair of boxing gloves.

[chuckles] Um, and, you know, so you-- I would, I would grow up hearing, um, Spanish, and it was...

I was surrounded by Haitian Creole, Jamaican, and to me, that was the bedrock of my imagination as, um, as an immigrant.

And so I wanted to capture this because I think when I look up, like, stories about Connecticut, you would, of course, hear about Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and but they were different Connecticuts.

They were from the past, and I wanted to update it with this place.

And I think a fictional place is a wonderful conduit because it is, um, stained with history, but still holding the potentials of something else, which is why I, I love fiction because, in a way, it's a, it's a suggestion of an otherness that perhaps we can still move forward towards.

Why did you decide not to change her name?

What would the one step forward you would want somebody to take?

At the end of my semester, in every class, I have my students do something very simple, and I do it as well.

And it's, it's-- you'd be surprised that many of them have never done it.

Um, and I, I...

What I do is I tell them: "Think about your intention.

Why are you here? Why did you sacrifice so much?" And I tell them, "Go back to that person that first found this art, the person who read a poem and said, [gasp] just like Emily Dickinson said, 'My head is taken off,' right? And then decided that they wanna do that for other people.

Write a work that transforms and affects people's lives that way.

I think everybody's had that experience.

Would you read a bit from your book for us? I think this section sets up sort of where Hai is in his life when we meet him.

Yes.

"When he was younger, Hai wanted a bigger life.

Instead, he got the life that won't let him go.

He was born in Vietnam 14 years after the big war everyone loved talking about but no one understood, least of all himself."The year was 1989, a year best known for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protest.

George Bush Sr. had defeated Michael Dukakis to be the 41st president, and My Prerogative by Bobby Brown was at the top of the charts.

It was a time of the floppy disk, denim jackets, leg warmers, Cool Ranch Doritos, and pasta salad.

"... where we would go to school." And I found that to be interesting, and I, and I kind of heard that a little bit in what your answer was.

Why is he confused by that initially?

I think for so many folks who are on the margins of society, there is so much inherent shame about where we should belong and where we should have access to, and so when she offers a place to stay for him, he almost thinks he mishears her, and, and that part of that is internalized shame.

Why would a stranger let me have a place to live and stay? And I think what I'm interested in this book is the things that we owe each other even when society tells us we're not supposed to.

In, in many places, we're supposed to just owe things to our family and friends, but I do believe a community is an extension of a kind of web, webbed kinship, and in this sense, she realized he's at the end of his rope, and he quickly realizes that he could be more useful to her than he was ever useful to himself.

And perhaps instead of a grand arc of finding reason to live, it's actually realizing the minute mundane actions, that we are actually much more helpful to someone next to us, and maybe that is an accretion of the will to live rather than a big central thesis that we s- so hunger for in this culture.

Would you read a bit from your book from us? I think this section sets up sort of where Hai is in his life when we meet him.

Yes.

When he was younger, Hai wanted a bigger life.

Mm.

... of process, um, she inspires me to no end, and it's a, it's a, it's a great honor to just h- have her be aware of my work.

Um, but, you know, fast food particularly is interesting, having worked in it, written about it.

It's a kind of sinister beauty that industrialization in America has, um, achieved, to, to do something so fine-tuned-...to chemically induce a product, like a McDonald's french fry, so that it can be replicated without break, consistently, through time, against all odds, even against, bio-degradation.

(laughs) Um, so that someone like Elon Musk can experience it.

A billionaire can experience a french fry, or a Coca-Cola.

And you mentioned about style being closer to desire, and I wondered if you had a style icon.

Oh, gosh.

Mm-hmm.

It's transformed, and when you're using language, you know, it, it's, you can create it, use it to, to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly as a bridge.

And that that notion that you are a participant in the future of language is something I think our American education failed us.

Language is always changing, and I think it's the poets, the writers, and even the youth, they're, they're using language to cast new meaning in the same way Chaucer just winged English spelling.

There was no standardized spelling.

Hmm.

These old factories.

The Colt gun factory was in Hartford, and it sold weapons to both sides during the Civil War.

Can I have you read an excerpt from the book that really describes this setting?

Sure.

It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne, until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're 30-something, and the Walmart hasn't changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.

It's where fathers in blue jeans flecked with wood stain stand at the edges of football fields, watching their sons steam in the reddened dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin' Donuts.

They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood.

And each morning, you'd sit on the frost-dusted bleachers, a worn copy of To The Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawks shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist.

And when you turn the page, it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boys' legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats, the words gone to ground.

Yeah.

Can I have you read an excerpt from the book that really describes this setting?

Sure.

It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne, until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're 30-something, and the Walmart hasn't changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.

It's where fathers in blue jeans flecked with wood stains stand at the edges of football fields, watching their sons steam in the reddened dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin' Donuts.

They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood.

And each morning, you'd sit on the frost-dusted bleachers, a worn copy of To The Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawks shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist.

And when you turn the page, it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boys' legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats, the words gone to ground.

(laughs)

It's fast food, but it was made by grandma in the back.

(laughs) It's like impossible, right? A lot of th- this country is founded on the nuclear family and one alternative to that, you can say, is the found family, chosen family.

But there's a huge sector I think I wanted to tap into which is the circumstantial family, the family at work, the family cobbled arbitrarily together during a shift.

And there's an intimacy and bond and kinship there that actually corrodes ideology.

We all have different politics.

We came from different parts of life.

But sometimes you bring it to the surface in, in different ways, right?

Yes, because I think we don't get to choose how we're, how we get a life, and we don't get to choose whether we're victims or not.

Mm-hmm.

She, that's her, her, her life.

And s-...

But I wanted to, you know, create that interface, because it's such a unique one.

The, the, the idea of, uh, this single mother refugee immigrant, who is absolutely traumatized by this American war brought forth by American foreign policy.

And so I, I always say that my Americanness, my citizenship began way before, uh, I ever arrived in this country.

My Americanness began when American bombs started to fall in Southern Vietnam, and that widens the scope of what America is and who gets to be American.

It's very interesting to deal with that, like, latency period between, um, something that happened to you, which of cou- of course still continues, but then realizing that that has stuck with you and s- for such a long time without you really dealing with it or even allo- giving yourself the grace to process it.

Yeah.

For 25 years, he worked from 3:00 PM to 12:00 AM.

I never saw him.

I came home at, from school at 4:00.

I r- only saw him on the weekends.

He would sleep in.

I saw, like, a tuft of hair poking out of the blanket in his room.

Have you had any epiphanic moments of satori recently?