Space Exploration: Susan Nguyen
Astronauts perform some strange superstitions before they shoot off into orbit to explore the vast expanses of space. NASA commanders play cards with the tech crew the night before a launch, continuing until the commander loses a hand. Russian cosmonauts pee on the right rear tire of their transfer bus on the way to a launch. These are strange quirks, but they are crucial for these space-explorers to feel comfortable before and during a mission.
Writers also have rituals that must be performed in order to shake off bad vibes and get into a zone where they feel comfortable putting words on a page. When we read a great book, we only see the final product, and not the obsessive care put into the work environment that allowed for its creation. In SPACE EXPLORATION, our goal is to demystify writers’ environments and explore the ways in which they’ve been created and curated, and how they affect the mental spaces of the authors who inhabit them.
We asked writers to tell us about their necessary spaces; the physical spaces as well as the desired headspace to write. We asked about their rituals— special meals that have to be eaten pre-writing sesh, only writing in purple ink, lucky pieces of clothing that may have once inspired a particularly powerful passage. We asked them to engage our senses and tell us which aspects of process must be deliberate and what is arbitrary. These are the spaces they shared with us.
This edition comes from Susan Nguyen, whose poetry collection Dear Diaspora was the recipient of the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize and will be published by University of Nebraska Press in September.
The text from the gallery images: When I was asked to share my writing rituals, I panicked. I’ve barely written in the past year. Any rituals I previously had (writing first thing in the morning before anyone or anything could infiltrate my day; no emails, no talking) have long since disappeared.
My living space has become my work-from-home space. I steal time to write whenever I can regardless of space or time or rituals.
After a year-long writing hiatus, I’m halfway through a crown of sonnets. I keep coming back to this line I miraculously arrived at and am now stuck on:
The heart is not a fist but a four-room chamber I enter and exit, blue with desire.
These days, I can’t count on the same physical or mental or emotional state when I go to write. I am slowly finding my way back to ritual and in the meanwhile, I can only hope to enter and exit my heart of memory, grief, joy.
I wanted to create a physical object that could, in some way, explore this entering and exiting.
And so, I created this pop-up zine. As you turn each page, you unfold a new room. When fully opened: four green rooms: the chambers of my heart.
The blue embroidery thread enters and exits each room at different points of the blue windows (or maybe they’re doors): a vein of blue desire entering and exiting different points of memory and imagination.
I wish that I had endless copies of this zine to send out to you all, so that you could hold its weight and feel its tangible creases. The edges of magazine paper that have already begun to peel.
Beyond the pages of this book, my desire continues and knows no end.
Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of "three women poets to watch." Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com