That’s a beautiful question-and one I think we must navigate for the rest of our creative lives. How have you balanced your family’s voices with your own? Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” There’s both intimacy and distance here: “used to be.” I imagine it’s not always clear how exactly our family’s voices arrive-or fail to arrive-in our work. Little Dog says, “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. I am grateful for his company, the words he presses down that I can carry, as we all go spinning forward. In our interview, Vuong speaks to the urgency of choosing to make art, “to breach new ground, despite terror,” to learn about himself and his relationships.

And so the self’s fractal parts coalesce, if only for a moment. Vuong performs a generous magic: he imagines every piece of each character all at once, in dialogue.

The voice of On Earth is at once singular and various. He tells her about sex about slipping under the water’s surface in the river outside the barn about staring at the small tail of hair on the back of Trevor’s neck, the part of a “hard-stitched boy” that was “so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings.” His mother responds with her own truths and memories. But even if some isolation endures, the space between them collapses as Little Dog writes into it. There’s a boy he loves, for instance, who she has never and will never meet. On the very first page, Little Dog, our protagonist, says, “Let me begin again.” He is writing to his mother about people and ideas he once fastidiously hid from her. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous concerns the most terrifying proximities, those involving the people we love. To listen and repeat, to read and reread, brings you into a proximity with his voice. Proximity builds tension.” Much of Vuong’s artistic practice-including the public reading of his work-seems to hinge on this principle. As Vuong told Kevin Nguyen for the New York Times, “It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone. On Earth uses the kishōtenketsu structure of classic east Asian narratives, which does not rely on conflict to advance the story. The novel is a letter to a mother, but it is also a letter to anyone who finds it. I experienced a similar sonic pull reading his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I wanted to draw as close as possible to this writer who had named something in me. I listened to it over and over, and recited it to myself, trying to remember where he paused, which words he made sharp, and which he made soft. Later, I found his reading of “ Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” published by The New Yorker. Vuong reads with precision: he embraces the quiet between words in such a way that every sound is allowed to reverberate.

At the far end of the room, I leaned forward, closed my eyes, and heard his voice as if he were right next to me. Two years ago, I listened to Ocean Vuong read poems from Night Sky with Exit Wounds in a crowded university hall.

Ocean vuong