Nancy Huang on Positionality, Ancestry, and Resisting Formalism in Writing
Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a winner of the 2016 Write Bloody Book contest, an Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize, a James F. Parker Award in Poetry, a 2015 YoungArts Finalist prize, and more. She has received fellowships from VONA, Tin House, and Pink Door. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter, is out by Write Bloody Publishing.
WSR: Introduce yourself in 30 seconds.
Nancy: I’m Nancy. It takes me a half-hour to do my hair every morning. I live in Bed-Stuy. My room’s always a mess. I don’t know how to skip stones. That’s something I’ve always struggled a lot with—it’s my Achilles heel of embarrassments. That and the fact that I listen to a lot of embarrassing music.
WSR: How would you describe your experience as an MFA student in NYU’s program so far?
Nancy: Looking back on last semester, or the first semester I entered the program, I feel I knew absolutely nothing then. Now that I’ve graduated, I feel completely different and transformed. It’s weird completing something in a year full of uncertainty.
WSR: Are you afraid of anything in writing or as a writer?
Nancy: I’m afraid of a lot of things. I’m very conscious about positionality in writing. Sometimes, I look back with a revising eye, and I consider, is it possible this could hurt someone, and if so, who could it hurt? I know that that’s a common and irrational fear. It’s impossible to have total control over how people receive your work for the rest of eternity. If my work gets co-opted one day by some movement I don’t endorse, that’s completely out of my control. Sometimes, it’s really terrifying to take on that burden.
Thematically, there are topics I’m scared and excited to explore, such as family, boundaries, ancestry. Considering who the people in my family have hurt, who has been hurt by my ancestors, and the people I’ve hurt. That’s always going to be difficult to look at.
WSR: As a writer, what does literary success look like to you?
Nancy: As long as I’m meaningfully producing and engaging with—I don’t know about the word “community”—but engaging with other people who are doing the same thing, that is success to me. If I don’t produce and engage with others but end up with a long publication list and a long list of awards even, that would represent a failure to me.
WSR: Do you resist anything in your writing?
Nancy: Absolutely. I don’t hate form; I just don’t think I’m a formalist. I think that counts as resisting something, even if I’m not intentionally trying to disengage with a way of writing. Thematically too, I really like to resist—sadly enough—my upbringing.
There’s a lot about my upbringing that I’m very haunted by that has done a lot of damage to me. Damage disguised as joy sometimes. That’s very complicated and hard to work out. Also, I try to resist easy explanations and simple ways to sum things up. I love leaning into the complicated and messy aspects of what I’m writing about.
WSR: What are you currently working on?
Nancy: My thesis. I will never be done with my thesis. It was technically due two days ago, but I am a coward. I didn’t submit it to my advisor—the wonderful Catherine Barnett—until 4 a.m. this morning. I told her it would be late, and she knew it was late. She asked Zachary for an extension. She gave me Monday as a new deadline for final edits; I thought I would’ve been done by that deadline, and as it turns out, I’m not.
It’s a very laborious project for me emotionally. The level of research I have to do, the level of intention I need to have when writing—it’s exhausting. I think that happens a lot when you have a project that you just can’t seem to finish or one that just keeps calling back to you, not allowing you to move on. That’s consuming my mind right now. After that, I don’t know. I hope I do more things.