Kathy Nguyen
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
Kathy Nguyen: I speak English and Vietnamese quite fluently, often codeswitching in my writing, which mirrors how I was and still am my parents' interpreter. Sometimes it feels precarious, using words to transliterally communicate between two languages and these struggles are reflected in several of my writing. Aphasia to experiencing stiff tongues are some themes I like to explore in my writing.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
KN: Sometimes it's a complex, ineffable feeling of or desire to release all that silent grief and suppressed anger that's been simmering and residing in the body. It can be honest or unreliable, as some writers—and people in general—can be.
ORP: What books have you read many times?
KN: To name a few: Eric Nguyen's Things We Lost to the Water, Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny, Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, Hanif Abdurraqb’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and several Japanese novels with a cat as a main character or just on the cover (I will always buy) such as Genki Kawamura's If Cats Disappeared from the World and Sosuke Natsukawa's The Cat Who Saved Books, and any Banana Yoshimoto novel such as Lizard, Dead-End Memories, and Kitchen.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
KN: Difficult question. Sometimes I wonder if it's the simultaneity of the narrative in/forming the writing and the writing in/forming the narrative.
