Wendy Chen’s "Their Divine Fires" by Brian Ngyuen

Wendy Chen, author of the poetry collection Unearthings, the novel Their Divine Fires (which came out this past Spring on May 7th, 2024, with Algonquin Books), and a book-length translation of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao called The Magpie at Night (forthcoming from Farra, Straus & Giroux in 2025), visited Clark University for a reading of her latest work. She currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is an editor of Figure 1 and an associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly and is the recipient of prizes and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, MacDowell, and many others. 

 

“But the existence of the ghost cannot be denied.”

 

As part of my creative writing course this semester, I’ve gotten to read Unearthings, participate in a workshop on prose poetry led by Wendy Chen, and listen to a reading of Their Divine Fires. Our class has made her a familiar and striking figure when it comes to writing our own poetry. She, like a ghost, has entered our subconscious minds through these chances to connect, tethering a bridge between her poetic experiences to ours. When we write from now on, it may always have a touch of this past self of her in our classroom, and I must appreciate her time and presence. 

 

“Dare to think, dare to act.”

 

Wendy Chen is a poet and writer that experiments with the boundaries of genres using her visual arts background and dream logic as lenses to explore interdisciplinarity. In the spirit of her talk, the unexplainable can be accessed through the way dream sequences work, because there is no sense of why, it just is. This elasticity to work in liminal spaces explains the form of her latest work as a novel, one that attempts to trace the history of one family and their journey in navigating Revolutions in China’s history, explore how the family ended up in America, and make sense of all the little choices that her family made to ensure the best from the old was passed on to the new generation. 

 

“It wouldn’t do if the words got lost in the speaking.”

 

The idea of unrequited love is one that keeps flowing through Wendy Chen’s poetry collection Unearthings in the wholeness of this dichotomy: the striking pain and the holistic healing that might be experienced through her words. I wanted to note the poem “Ordinary Clamor”, because this was the point in the book when I started to relate to some of the collections’ ideas and understand where other poems like “Psalms” came from. I really enjoyed the fascination with hands and what’s possible that comes out of creation and how the hands are the means to do so, paired with the poet who unearths the dead to find its secrets. What really struck me was how Wendy subverted the value of the face in the beginning of the poem only to equate the creating hand to a face by the end; the motifs play into each other and push meaning with contradiction. Juxtaposing the two, the result is the hand that grows in the hand; it feels quite resolute. By the end of the whole book, I get a sense that the process of healing is quite like this, “At times I want us torn/and torn until the pieces/are too small to love.” (57). It’s the words ‘at times’ that sets healing in a pendulum that needs to be, in order to keep the momentum in its process.

 

 

From the Q&A on the Reading of Their Divine Fires:

 

How do you know when it is done, and that over the course of 7 years, to not go back to tweak and revise?

 

She reflects saying that you have to realize that your writing is a first draft and that there will be more drafts, relinquishing the fact that it will never be “done done”. There are deadlines that have to be met and scheduling retroactively will help you keep going out of necessity. Another thing that helps her is having readers to look back and give feedback throughout the process, because you can’t look at your own work with fresh eyes as you’re writing. 

 

What did your research look like for the book?

 

She did her research with family, by asking questions and pinning down first hand account stories to familiarize herself with the history. To parallel the language used in that time frame (and replicate it), she utilizes propaganda posters and other primary sources in an attempt to rewrite ‘lost history trying to be written again’. 

 

What moments do you know when to contextualize or dive deeper into its history?

 

Considering that she’s writing for the purpose of an imagined younger self to be curious to know more instead of a larger majority white audience, she does not think of the book with a historical fiction lens, and rather writes on only the history of one particular family to “focus on the granular”. She also mentioned that her revision process allows her to know where to add more context through research, talking with family, and primary sources. 

 

How did you come to realize the audience you wanted to write for is a younger self?

 

She wanted to write on Chinese/Chinese American history as the primary subtext to reach others so that they might feel seen, visible, and less alone in their emotions and experiences. 

 

How do you strike balance in writing prose or poetry or both?

 

When the form of epic poetry pushed back against the message that she wanted to get across in Their Divine Fires, that was the deciding factor for the current form in prose. Because of this, she had to transition from her comfort in writing in isolated darkness in the AM for poetry to setting aside hours to sit down to write the novel. This pushed some of her genre borders as she questions both herself and us, “Who are you as writers in new forms?”

 

How does the idea of ghosts relate to the translation project?

 

She correlates dreams with ghosts, because you have to bring them out and settle with them. The old writers haunt their own words, but that’s not enough with the distance in time and contexts. So she has to dream the circumstances in which it was written to represent the work the best she can for contemporaries. 

 

Are there other works with dream logic in play, intentionally or unintentionally? How does this play out in your everyday life?

 

In short, yes, there are other works, because her thinking is in the narrative structure of dreams, the subconscious generative creation of (writing) material, which aids against writer’s block.

 

Can you talk about being a writer in the Las Vegas area?

 

She grew up in Massachusetts and only moved to Las Vegas last year, but finds it interesting to have a tourist, consumerist setting surrounded by environmental talks and concerns that she doesn’t know the history or national contexts of yet. She still feels like an outsider and hasn’t claimed Las Vegas as her own yet.