Solid Objects: Dorothy Chan
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This inaugural edition is written by Dorothy Chan, whose poetry collection BABE is out now from Diode Editions.
Las Vegas is the city that reminds me the most of my childhood. I remember visiting Caesar’s Palace around the turn of the millennium and thinking it was the most magical place on earth—better than Disney World—better than a table at Legal Seafood, munching on their Little Fisherman’s meal. I say this unironically: as a kid I had a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology and art, and an even deeper fascination with reproduced “high art” juxtaposed in such a tacky setting of slot machines and poker tables and aquariums galore. My family stayed at the MGM Grand, and we took long day walks along the Strip. I played carnival games in the basement of the Excalibur with my dad. We visited M&Ms World. I marveled over the fake graffiti and slogan of New York New York: “A city so vice we named it twice.” But there was something special about the Caesar’s Palace unabashed over-the-top nature that got me. I loved the fact that Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy, in the now defunct Disney Store at the Forum Shops, wore togas, acting out their own family-friendly Greek play.
I mean, Did Caesar even live in a palace? I remember posing this question in a graduate critical theory seminar once, while giving a presentation on Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism. I also think back to Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Theme,” from Madness, Rack, and Honey, and the connections between theme and coincidence and how that creates an even deeper contemporary meaning. It’s no wonder that as an adult, my major themes in poetry and writing include food, sex, fantasy, and yes, excess—all the great things in life that you want a million more of. It’s also a strange coincidence that my parents ended up moving from the East Coast to Las Vegas, for retirement. It makes for a nice throwback (or origin story). What’s another odd coincidence is how years after that Vegas family vacation, an ex-boyfriend and I realized we met at the MGM Grand as children. I thought about this odd coincidence one early afternoon, about three years ago, in an Uber on the way to a date at the Aria Hotel, which would lead into a long-term “Whatever this is” romance.
When I write, I analyze kitsch and popular culture. Karen Tongson’s writings on American popular culture through the lens of a queer child of immigrants constantly fuels my teaching and creativity. She’s an essential read. I’ve been writing prose poems lately, and I can’t get the image of Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi Malone (her name is wordplay) from Showgirls out of my head. It’s that scene when Nomi sits atop the Flamingo Hotel, at sunset, eating a burger. I still visit the Flamingo Hotel when I visit my parents—entering that space is like entering a time capsule. Or going back to kitsch, I think back to the image of out of towners taking selfies in front of the David statue (like it’s the real thing) outside of Nobu in Caesar’s Palace.
I love excess. I love having a lot of shelf space, in both my apartment and in my office at school. A kitschy “Las Vegas Princess” miniature snow globe from the Sugar Factory in Vegas sits atop my shelves at home, next to Sanrio toys, Kidrobot figurines, gifts from friends, and Iwako erasures that remind me of my childhood. This souvenir reminds me of my childhood because no matter how cold it gets here or how much the work piles up or how much I miss my loved ones, I can always go back to moments of joy, and let these moments fuel my writing. A celebrity once said that when you grow up, you still like the same things you liked as a kid. I find that completely true. Or as Liberace, one of my Vegas idols (and life idols in general) once said: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.” More is more.
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of most recently, BABE (Diode Editions 2021), in addition to Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. They are this year's Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.