A Kernel on Genre Hopping
with writer Wendy Chin-Tanner
Welcome to another installment of Kernel Interviews, a series in which we chat with authors whose books inspire us. Today we’re speaking with Wendy Chin-Tanner, a fiction writer and poet whose novel King of the Armadillos was released last July with Flatiron Books. Previously, she’s published two poetry collections, Anyone Will Tell You and Turn; she co-edited Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology; she co-wrote the graphic novel American Terrorist; and she is co-publisher of A Wave Blue World, an independent publisher for graphic novels, with her husband Tyler Chin-Tanner.
Born and raised in New York City, Chin-Tanner found success early on when she won the national Scholastic writing award in high school for her poetry. She then went to Cambridge University in the UK to study English literature.
Shelby chatted with Chin-Tanner over Zoom about her writing journey, jumping genres, and letting the project take the reins.
[Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.]
Shelby Newsome: Tell me about your writing journey.
Wendy Chin-Tanner: Well, it's been a long and circuitous road.
In my senior year at Cambridge University, I had a poem published in The Mays anthology of Oxford and Cambridge, which is a literary journal where London agents will look for new talent. I didn't expect anything because, by then, I knew that agents aren't really scouting poets. But I was approached by one.
It was a little bit weird because he said, “I’m not interested in your poetry. However, if you wanted to try fiction or if you wanted to try screenwriting, I would be interested in representing you.” I had never written fiction before. But I had done a lot of theater. So I wrote a script, and when I sent some pages to him, he told me it was unsellable because the protagonist was an Asian American male. He was like, “Nobody can identify with this character.”
After he told me that the script was unsellable, I was really knocked off my horse. Instead of thinking, “I’ll try again” or “I’ll see if somebody else is interested,” I was like, “this was my one shot. I guess that means I’m not supposed to be a writer.”
So I went back to grad school for sociology. I did not write a word creatively during that whole time because I took that one man's “no” as gospel. Sociology was stimulating, but it wasn't my plan A and it wasn't really where my heart was.
Ten years later, right after the birth of my first daughter, who is 16 now, there was something about that very trippy, psychedelic time that popped the cork off of that writer's block. I didn't even realize that I was writing again. I was dreaming a lot, and I would just take notes. I scribbled them on whatever bits of paper were around, like receipts and bills and whatever. I started poking at them and expanding them and they became poems. There was something about the fact that I'd given up so long before; the stakes seemed super low and I wasn't freaked out. Eventually those poems grew into what became my first poetry collection, Turn.
Instead of thinking, “I’ll try again” or “I’ll see if somebody else is interested,” I was like, “this was my one shot. I guess that means I’m not supposed to be a writer.”
-Wendy Chin-Tanner
You are the author and publisher of poetry, graphic novels, anthologies, and art books. What is it like wearing these different hats in the creative world, and how has it informed your work?
It's helpful for me to jump from project to project so that I don't get anxious about any one thing. King of the Armadillos was interrupted by Anyone Will Tell You. I started King around 2013, and then during my pregnancy and after the birth of my younger daughter, I started to hear the music of the words that went into Anyone Will Tell You. My daughter was one of those marsupial babies who needed to be in the baby carrier at all times. So I was pacing my hallway for hours and hours every day and all I had was my iPhone. I couldn't comfortably write anything with the baby right there, but I could write on my iPhone Notes app. When I started to hear snippets of poems, I would write them on the app. That lent itself to the form that I developed for that book, which was trisyllabic tercets: three syllables per line, three lines per stanza. That came out of the physical fact of having just one thumb to type with.
Your debut novel King of the Armadillos is about a Chinese American boy in the 1950s who is diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, otherwise known as leprosy, and sent to a treatment facility in Carville, Louisiana. You’ve shared that the story is based on your father and his experience as a former Hansen’s patient. What was it like carrying his secret for so long before he decided to open up?
Because I'd known about it for as long as I can remember, that secrecy was normalized. But also Carville and the diagnosis were normalized. My dad deciding that he didn't want it to be a secret anymore felt more momentous to me than keeping the secret. In addition to being a former Hansen’s patient, my dad was diagnosed with and recovered from colon cancer. We were in the office with his surgeon, and his surgeon didn’t know anything about Carville and didn’t know much about Hansen’s disease. If medical practitioners who aren't even that young, don't know about it, then that's a lost piece of American medical history and American cultural history. He realized that there was value to people knowing about the story and that there was no reason to be ashamed of it anymore.
Initially I was going to write King of the Armadillos as nonfiction. I was interviewing my dad and looking into research materials that he was able to get from the museum [at Carville]. I did feel increasingly self-conscious that I needed to represent it accurately. The result was that the voice that I was writing in at that time was restricted. There was something about Victor's story—and he wasn't even Victor at that time—and his voice that was passive. Things kept happening to him. He wasn't the driver of the story.
When I was going through the archives, I was particularly looking for oral histories given by young people in the 1950s to hear their voices and to find not just the way they spoke but also the slang that was specific to Carville. During that time, there was a disproportionately high number of Asian American patients, but I couldn't find a single firsthand narrative given by an Asian patient. I don't know if it was because they didn't want to talk about it or if it was because of racism or institutional neglect, but the fact remained that there was this hole in the history, and I really wanted to fill that hole. At the same time, that was an added burden and a huge responsibility because I'm not just representing this one story now, I'm representing all these people. And how can I possibly do that?
The solution was to write it as fiction. And in that way, I was able to take the main character away from my dad so that he could be his own person. I put more of myself into Victor, actually, because it felt more comfortable to me to put in my own complications and my own human flaws. Once it became fictionalized, I think it allowed my dad to enjoy it more, too.
A creative project or a creative entity has a life of its own and a consciousness of its own.
-Wendy Chin-Tanner
In your wildest dreams, did you ever imagine you’d write a novel? How did this process differ from other creative ventures?
Oh my God. Totally not. I never, ever, ever thought I would write fiction of any kind. For some reason, I reified the genre as something that was beyond my ability or my skill set. I knew that I was a poet. And I love fiction; I read a lot of it. But I didn't feel like it was something that came natural to me or that I could handle. Now I've got a few more novels brewing. So you never know what'll happen. Never say never.
I’m also the sort of person who does jump around to different genres. Maybe it’s because I am impatient or get bored easily, but it’s kind of mysterious, right? Like every creative person experiences this mystery of where the hell is this idea coming from? You don't know, you're just tapping into something and almost like taking dictation. So in a sense, you have to humble yourself to whatever preconceived notions you have—not just about your own writing, but also about genre and what that project demands.
The best advice that I got around that was from Lidia Yuknavitch, who very, very kindly blurbed the book. She's a writer that I knew from Portland from when I lived there. I met her for the first time at a talk that she was giving; she later became a friend. At that first meeting, she made this very profound statement that I never forgot, which is: the project is gonna tell you what it needs to be. You have to listen for that and do what it says because it knows what's best for itself. This is so interesting because it also presumes that a creative project or a creative entity has a life of its own and a consciousness of its own. And in my experience, that's actually true.
In an essay you penned for Lit Hub about your writing process for the novel, you said, “To help myself, I pretended to write poems instead, collecting lyrical vignettes like scraps of fabric to quilt together later.” I really felt the elevation of language, in the descriptions and syntax. How do you feel your poetic understanding of language contributed to this story?
First of all, I think it allowed me to trick myself into writing fiction because poetry is like a bridge between the real and the fictional in a sense. But on a line level, it was also a bridge between the story and what the story was about, or at least what the story is very much about, which is music. The lyricism of the language lends itself to the content. I also think that putting together poetry collections was helpful, dealing with a very large amount of material and trusting that I knew how to assemble it in a way that created narrative arcs. That was another bridge for me into feeling like maybe I could make a novel, because I wrote those initial parts chronologically all over the place. And I had no idea how those scenes would fit together as I was writing them. From my experience of using that process to write my poetry collections, I was able to trust that somehow I would be able to quilt together those scraps in a way that made sense narratively.
King of the Armadillos starts with the protagonist, Victor, boarding a train to Carville, paying homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which also starts with its hero taking the train to a sanitorium. What other books do you find your novel to be in conversation with?
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. Not only did it help me get into that Southern Gothic mode, but it also held the key of how to write in a literary fiction manner about young people while taking their emotions and their experiences seriously. Also, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to some degree. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which is another book that is about a group of young people who meet under really concentrated circumstances. It helped me understand how to write about teenage dynamics and how to write about teenage sexuality, which was something that was a bit difficult for me to navigate initially. I read Nabokov's Speak, Memory while I was writing this book, and I think that helped me tap into this idea of nostalgia. It's his memoir, essentially, which deals very heavily with his youth and how his emotional interiority was shaped at that time. And Lauren Groff's Arcadia, which is another book about young people in an isolated setting.
What does your writing process look like? Any specific routines or rituals that help you write?
I write a lot in my iPhone Notes app because it feels less scary. Before I had kids, I used to write in the cheapest notebooks I could find. People like to give me beautiful leather-bound journals as gifts and they often stay blank. They're too scary to write in.
I begin the process of a new novel by feeding it, by researching in a very omnivorous and open way. I'll watch TV shows and movies that have the same vibe. I'll read other books and newspaper articles. Sometimes I interview people. In the first draft, I try to be as open as possible, to not worry about editing. Once I've accumulated enough of it, I go into that secondary mode, which is more analytical and editorial. But if I go there too quickly, it stifles the voice.
Each individual writer has a different process, and it took me a while to figure that out. I would read about how other writers worked and I would feel less than. Some writers will wake up at four in the morning every day. They have this very meticulous list of things that they do. I'm a working mom. I have two young kids. I can't sit down for five-hour chunks all the time.
Can you tell us about any upcoming writing projects you have in the works?
I have a few in the works. My next book is completely different from King of the Armadillos. It is a contemporary, satirical comedy, and it's called MILF. It's still going to look at topics and issues from an intersectional perspective and look at how these people in this world fit into larger systems but through the modality of comedy. The project sprang from a New York magazine article I read about how “MILF” was the top search on Pornhub for the vast majority of the country.
Then, my husband Tyler and I have a couple of projects that we really want to collaborate on. Our company is expanding a little bit more into YA and middle grade graphic novels. We're thinking about doing a middle grade fantasy feminist retelling of The Odyssey. Also, we're thinking about a YA project set in the 1990s about two young women of color in a primarily white prep school in New York City and their parallel experiences.
To close, what kernel of advice do you have for our readers?
I imagine that, as emerging writers, a lot of you might be pre-agent and getting close to looking for an agent. I went on that rodeo twice. At that phase, it's really important to have a list on hand of questions that you wanna ask them, not just answering questions that they ask you. Know what your deal breakers are and what you're looking for.
Your agent is going to be the person who's preparing your manuscript, getting it almost to the level where it would be publishable. My agent, Jamie Carr, and I did four drafts together before we took the book to market. It was really essential to me that our rapport was good and clear on the page. I knew that Jamie was the one when our first interview phone call was three hours long and we were already brainstorming about story stuff.
Wendy’s kernel of advice: Find an agent you connect with and who champions you.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
This week, Shelby started reading an arc of Loneliness & Company by Charlee Dyroff, one of her most anticipated books of the year. So far, it’s living up to the anticipation! The story takes place in near future New York and centers on a secret government project aiming to combat loneliness—an emotion that’d been eradicated from society’s lexicon—through AI. The protagonist is a smart, research-oriented woman who has a lot to learn about human connection. Dyroff’s writing style is the kind of syntactical poetic concision that Shelby admires.
Neidy is reading Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and Emma Cline’s The Girls. Machado’s book is the first towards Neidy’s New Year’s resolution of reading more short story collections, and it has been an excellent choice. Neidy is really enjoying Machado’s ability to speak about universal truths of womanhood while infusing her stories with fantastic elements. Neidy is reading Cline’s novel as a potential comp title to her work-in-progress. Specifically, Neidy is interested in how Cline will balance her protagonist’s likability with her involvement in a cult.
All of Sarah’s reading and writing plans for the week were derailed by the freak snowstorm that settled in the South. Being housebound for seven days with a bunch of children was not at all conducive to creative work, and she is out of food and patience and CBD oil. That said, she managed to somehow eke out 1,000 words a day on her novel, which she knows is a success, so why is she still so stressed and crying all the time?
Natalia took on a new role at her job; it’s embarrassing for her to admit that it’s only seven more hours of work a week. It drained her of all her energy let alone creative abilities, so she only wrote 200 words towards her novel this week that will likely be thrown out. She has managed to read through most of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders.