Award-winning Northeastern professor will publish ‘non-linear’ memoir
An American Book Award-winning poet with severe dyslexia, Truong Tran will release a non-linear memoir titled “How to Exi(s)T.”
OAKLAND – At 57 years old, Truong Tran, a professor of writing on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus and winner of the 2022 American Book Award, said he was finally ready to write a story.
The author of six previous collections of poetry, Tran said his severe dyslexia provides a unique relationship to text that has always lent itself to more abstract forms of writing, such as poetry. This literary medium forgives his natural inclination to read and write in fragmented ways, Tran said, granting him the authority to assert his imagination in all of its complexity.
“But now, as I’m 57, I want to write a story, like a real long-form story,” said Tran as he smiled, zipping his jacket to his chin on a windy afternoon at the campus’s central Adams Plaza. “If you can’t do it now, when are you going to do it?”
That “real long-form story” has manifested in Tran’s first book – an autobiography – written entirely in prose. Titled “How to Exi(s)T: A Poet’s Memoir,” it will be available on bookshelves on Oct. 6. But though it comprises dozens of stories that feature standard sentences and punctuation, the book’s narrative structure holds true to Tran’s non-linear perspective on his life, he said.
It’s organized as a collection of 94 miniature essays – which Tran called “essayettes” – covering moments beginning from his family’s immigration to the Bay Area in 1975, when he was 5, after living in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Kansas.
Some essays are as short as single paragraphs. For instance, in one essay, Tran offers advice to his younger self.
“Writing is hard work. Write what is hard. Do the work. Claim your voice,” Tran tells himself in the final vignette of the book’s first section, which is composed of disparate anecdotes and ideas on storytelling, friends, dyslexia, translation and silence. “If you are angry, write your anger. Break something with your words,” he says.
Others span several pages, giving Tran space to resurrect fond family memories, examine feelings of otherness during his upbringing as an immigrant in San Jose, or confront unanswered questions about his realization, while still young, that he is gay.
“I kept this story for all these years because something inside tells me to keep this memory,” writes Tran in one essayette on his yet-unresolved feelings about the day, as a child, when a boy he liked stood him up. “Why have I written this now, forty-seven years later?”
Tran said he submitted the 94 essays long before he considered them the puzzle pieces of a memoir. His editor saw a throughline, he said, and suggested that Tran arrange them as a telling of his life, one that plays with form and structure as if it were poetry.
“I write in a way that feels like it’s swirling around. I move backwards and forwards in time, and I seem to resist this idea of linear movement,” Tran said. The resulting memoir is “fragmented, but then again, the fragmentary nature of the work is probably the most true form that it can exist in.”
For Tran, the book also represents a turning point in his identity as a writer.
Editor’s Picks
Despite its positive critical reception, his previous publication, a poetry collection titled “Book of the Other: Small in Comparison,” felt like something he was forced to write as a measure of survival, Tran said. The book focused on his experiences with institutional racism, and its contents represented a weight on Tran’s shoulders that he said he had carried in silence for too long.
“With ‘Book of the Other,’ I wrote myself out of the unwanted inheritance of that silence and back into existence,” Tran writes in his memoir’s preface. “If ‘Book of the Other’ was the endeavor of living and enduring, then ‘How to Exi(s)t’ is my assertion of living and thriving.”
That assertion manifests as detailed observations of Tran’s friends and family, contemplative wonderings about fleeting moments from his career as a writer and, previously, a visual artist, and reflections on the meaning of the American Dream in the current sociopolitical climate. They are interspersed with artful introspections of Tran’s inner world, and essays that challenge his own memory of events and feelings as he searches for new clarity.
This style of writing is what Tran said he will try to convey to the latest cohort of Northeastern students when he returns to teaching in the spring. In his creative writing classes, Tran said he encourages students to remain authentic to their beliefs, regardless of how they might clash with his own.
“My invitation to them when they first enter into the class is that they think wildly and freely, and that they have the authority to claim that freedom and lavish thought,” he said. “We could disagree the entire length of the semester, but if you take a position and you believe it, then that’s what’s going to make you successful.”
Tran, who will tour the country this fall to celebrate the memoir’s launch, said he hopes his readers get lost in his story and find their own way through it.
“Knowing that I wrote a book of prose feels really wonderful because it feels like I did something that I didn’t think I would ever do,” he said. “I hope that there’s enough registry of a life experience that someone can see themselves in it.”
