1. Where are you from? Why?
I was born in Toronto, Canada, but have lived in the California Bay Area for over twenty years, so I think that changes where I’m from, which is from there, or here, if one is to consider this humble one’s POV. As for why, my dad got a job here, and I was only 10, so I had to follow my mom and dad here.
2. Generate a relevant formula.
If happiness is x, then x-pect it not to happen.
3. Does confusion have a part in your writing? Is it the cause or the result?
Auden said art was clear thinking about mixed feelings, which really resonated with me. I like super-rational writing—almost facetiously rational to the absurd, like Georges Perec—which feels rhetorically evasive from feelings. In “Major digression set to minor,” I wanted to impose a sad little story onto an otherwise absurdly, somewhat confrontational, footnoted piece. It was to become clear that the piece was a letter written by the husband to his ex-wife, which is what I like doing—using the first person in a third person way (i.e. not me).
4. FictionDaily recently shined a light on a piece of yours in Abjective (“Major digression set to minor”) that begins: “As I am not keen on the word shat, it is difficult for me to say I noticed that you shat in the pool again.” For reasons beyond its scatological elements, we enjoyed that sentence. How does one provoke a reaction with words? Can you provide another example?
You say provoke, I say poke. I guess it all depends on where the soft spot is.
5. On a related note, how does humor come about in writing? Is written humor – versus spoken humor - different in kind, delivery, amplitude, or what?
I think about this a lot. It’s very different, for me. I once transcribed a Seinfeld stand-up joke in my once editorial capacity, and realized it wasn’t so funny when read. Larry David recently wrote an op ed in The New York Times, which I didn’t find funny—though he’s brilliant in Curb Your Enthusiasm. P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh are hilarious on the page, though I’d hate to see them on stage. And then, of course, there are the truly humorous—humor which is largely morose, depressing, and full of empathy, like D.F. Wallace or Kafka. A lot of humor is timing, syntax, etc. The spoken vs. written are entirely different fields. There’s also a performance element, like Woody Allen is inherently funny in his films because of his mannerisms, which doesn’t translate on the page.
6. What is there, and what should we do about it?
Seems sorta zen, so let me answer this way: my favorite haiku, written by an anonymous, goes: in my hut this morning / there is nothing / there is everything. This sort of blew my mind when I read it—oddly, posted on a door in Mississippi of all places—because it clarified how I tried to view life, as this meaningless vacant thing that was so open to beauty.
7. You’ve published a lot of fiction online (http://jimmychenchen.com/fiction), and there definitely seems to be something “Chen-like” about each piece that distinguishes it from work by any other. What is that something, in your estimation? How would you describe your “voice”?
I guess that’s a huge compliment, to say “Chen-like,” because every writer wants their last name followed by a “-like,” or if you’re a lit-douche “-esque” (I recall in The Squid and the Whale when Kafka is referred to as Kafkaesque). So thanks. It’s hard to describe my voice or style—I just know about what I don’t want to write, and then everything else seems exciting. I don’t want to just tell autobiographical stories about this or that thing that happened with a random names inserted over actual names, you end up with stories about going to some bar or some argument in an apartment and it’s boring as hell; nor do I want to write experimental lyrical languagey pieces which often alienate the reader with a kind of consumed solipsism. I want to discover things with each piece, and for the reader to join me in that ride. Every story is a possibility, not an imperative. I keep on mentioning Oblivion by D.F. Wallace, because, truly, that book was mind blowing, in the sense that each story was an experiment and manifestation on how a story could be written—but not in some annoying Gertrude Stein or Ben Marcus way (both who I respect, just making a point here.) With Wallace, the experimentation, it seems, was on behalf of the reader—like a guy takes a girl on a date (Wallace is the guy and we’re the girl here) and has this elaborate plan to run out of gas at a precise place so he can take her to a small bed n’ breakfast and make sweet love to her: it’s all for her, the entire charade, each choreographed movement, until that final moment of two eyes locked together one foot away from each other, somewhere in this universe, two people fucking, just like that, so simple, in, out, in, out, to reach a closeness that we feel dead without. Well, that’s what writing and reading is, fucking. I’m talking about sex—I’m talking about love, and so “fuck you” and “I love you” are the same thing really, like our nothing-everything room. Every story, if I’m lucky, is a fuck-off love letter to this world.
Jimmy Chen writes short fiction and essays. He lives in San Francisco, and can be found online at jimmychenchen.com.
