Ocean Vuong, the celebrated novelist, poet, and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, spoke before a packed audience at UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall on December 3 to discuss effort, stillness, and the beauty of hard work. UCSB Arts and Lectures hosted the author best known for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and his newest release, The Emperor of Gladness. Over the course of the evening, he spoke with a delicate lyricism and clarity, opening a window into questions about his writing and teaching.
Vuong began with the foundation of his work, that is, language itself, describing it as a force, “Language is like gravity… Once you’re in it, you cannot get out.”
Vuong also spoke about the cultural obsession with being effortless, framing it as something that destroys authenticity and creativity. “I think I’m very skeptical when things come easy. I think in our culture, in America, we fetishize effortlessness,” he explained. He talked about working in fashion earlier in his life, and how he watched models transform into a sort of stoicism. “The model never looks at you,” he said, “they look past you, which means that they are superior because they are disaffected…. In a culture where we are constantly being linguistically coerced, wherein a citizen is being constantly assaulted in order to be seduced, it’s incredibly powerful to be then unmoved.”
For Vuong, this nonchalance is dangerous to creativity. “I really value effort,” he shared. “I think that’s why it’s deeply broken to me the idea of AI, using it to write…. that’s such a fraudulent impulse because the whole premise, to me, of being a writer, is to test my consciousness through the procedural friction of the sentence.”
Vuong moved to talk about his time teaching, and how his approach focuses on care and a delay in judgement. He explained how for the first four weeks of his course, he does not allow criticism. “When you criticize right away, it’s almost like giving advice to strangers,” he said. “Why would you walk up to a stranger and start giving them advice, right? So instead, we spend the first few weeks knowing the tendencies of each writer.” He went on to say that by doing this, “it’s like giving advice now to a friend…. When the criticisms come, they’re not painful, because they’re always in service of the writer’s desires and goals, and the students start to see that and it becomes much more productive and less personal.”
Vuong also warned that the moment a young writer realizes that they’ve done something well is often the moment their growth stops. “Good, that’s your 10. Now let’s push for 12,” he tells his students, urging them to not limit themselves with their achievements, and to instead expand their writing further.
When asked about his first novel, Vuong posed questions surrounding the existence of language: “If communication is gone, then what else does language do for the wielder? Does it change even yourself? If you have a message in a bottle, thrown into the sea, knowing it will sink and no one will touch it, does the language itself, with no audience, matter?” He then went on to say, “If you wield the language as a species, as a human, does it change you? Does it have resonance even though you are not heard? If I have no voice, if no one will hear me, can I still impact if I speak anyway?”
Vuong briefly spoke about his writing routine, and how he doesn’t believe in breakthroughs and that he realized that he couldn’t write every day. He learned how to redefine work in a culture that “fetishizes evidentiary work,” asserting that when he allowed himself to not be making but still work, he “got to think deeply.” He expanded further, saying, “It’s about reconfiguring work and redefining it so that you are not ashamed of yourself for being still. Stillness is very productive.”
At the end of the evening, Vuong answered a question that asked about love. “I say this only as someone who watched and dealt with my mother’s deathbed: you realize all the things that you wanted from your loved one… [go] out the window when you’re watching them try so hard to take their last breath… The labor in my mother’s last breath was so loving… All of a sudden, all of the things that I wanted from her, she wanted from me, were so small as to be inconsequential, I couldn’t even name them.”
