No. ONE

ALEXANDER CHEE

Brooks In a recent interview with Kate Mabus, you talked about the fact that you never think okay, now I will write about identity. Instead, you said “I just have questions like Why am I like this? Where does that come from? I think we call it identity in the US because it seems like that's one step removed from saying that you're writing about yourself.” I recently came across an interview with Toni Morrison, from 1998, where she was asked by Australian journalist Jana Wendt…

Chee Oh, yes, I know this interview.

Brooks It’s a great one. Wendt asked her will you ever write about white people, in a substantial way? And Morrison, in her direct and elegant manner, responded “You can’t understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you? Because you could never ask a white author, when are you going to write about black people?…Even the inquiry comes from a position of being in the center.” I was thinking about our current political and cultural climate, where there is so much active opposition to things like DEI and anything remotely connected to “identity,” which reveals that this age-old centering of whiteness and heteronormativity still exists in a powerful way. Why do you think it is so difficult for some people to comprehend that Queer and POC writers and artists want to and will make work that reflects our lives—which is obviously quite natural and understandable—and why are we put in a separate category of not being just writers, but writers who write about identity?

Chee I feel like when people ask me that, what they're really asking me is, why don't you participate in your own erasure? Which is what I think that interviewer was, in a sense, asking Morrison.

Brooks Yes.

Chee Why don't you collaborate with your own erasure? Why must you insist on knowing who you are? Everybody has an identity. Some of us know this. Some do not.

Brooks Yes. Just like everybody has a pronoun.

Chee Right. And so the suggestion that you write about identity where others don’t is actually interesting to me because I'm always like, well, what are they writing about? I remember when it became very fashionable to say that you wrote stories where nothing really happened and I thought about that for a long time. And it wasn't interesting to me as a project, just as it wasn't interesting for me to write about this ahistorical idea of whiteness or identity. I can't let that in to where I'm writing or I feel like I go nuts.

Brooks It’s interesting that you use that phrase I can't let that in because in that same interview—or maybe another—you said you sort of feel best writing when you think no one can find you.

Chee I think that's true. I think there’s a sense of the fugitive….it’s like I feel that when I know that I'm safe from other people's intrusions.

Brooks I understand that. My studio is a place of sanctuary, and even though I'm mostly working with figures and the work is very intimate—and I have come to see it as a  kind of communing with person I’m depicting—working for me is a solitary endeavor.

Chee Right.

Brooks There are, not surprisingly, more distractions here in L.A. than there were in Louisville. I’m working on that. I suppose there aren’t that many distractions in the snowy Vermont woods?

Chee Yes and no. Are you really ever free from distraction if you can get online?

Brooks That’s true.

Chee Distraction for me is usually a sign that there's something I'm afraid of, that I'm running away from something, so I try to be very aware of that in myself.

Brooks Life is always trying to get in the way of the work.

Chee Yes.

Brooks Do you write on the computer, or longhand, or what do you do?

Chee It tends to vary. Sometimes I write on my phone. I write in a notebook, sometimes I write on my computer. Right now I'm in a part of the process where it's usually very computer focused. I’m working on a third draft of the novel and so I am retyping it from the second draft, so I'm at the computer; I have the print out and I'm working off that.

Brooks Do you enjoy this part of the process?

Chee Yeah, I enjoy pretty much all the parts of the process. I was thinking about this recently kind of in relationship to AI, and I just was thinking why would you want to skip this?

Brooks Right.

Chee I think the thing that bothers me, increasingly, about the idea of AI and art is that it does seem like it's the solution to a problem nobody has. Nobody's like, hey, what if a computer could write a novel for me?

Brooks No.

Chee It’s a really idle rich man’s sport to figure out if that is possible. I appreciate the uses of AI to, say, figure out drug resistant antibiotics. I think it's a great use for it. How do you write a novel? Well, you have to try to write it. That's the whole fucking point.

Brooks Exactly.

Chee It's really hard! But also, the hardship isn't a cruelty, even if it feels like that sometimes. The hardship is about picking yourself out, looking into your own mind, working on your own thoughts. How do you approach this? How do you make this? That's the part that's interesting.

Brooks Exactly. The hardship is part of the pleasure.

Chee Yes.

Brooks Because when you're on the other side of the hardship, and you’ve completed your novel, or not even just completed it, but you've furthered it along more than it was, that’s the point.

Chee Yes.

Brooks Do you know this Joseph Fasano poem For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper ?

Chee No, but I know his poetry.

Brooks It’s wonderful. I won’t read the whole thing, but it ends:

I know your days are precious

on this earth.

But what are you trying

to be free of?

The living? The miraculous

task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

The first time I read that, it really resonated with me because, sure, a computer program could write a poem, a computer program could make a painting. Great, congratulations; that’s not the point. As someone who writes poems and makes paintings, I want to do that. I don't want AI to do that. If AI can do my taxes, great, amazing.

Chee I think that what we’re seeing with AI is the way that it's an attack on the cultural power of artists, it’s an attempt to both demean our work and to demean us in the process. I feel like it's just a part of the fascistic government that has come to power.

Brooks Yes, I agree. They mean to reduce us to something frivolous and unnecessary. As we are obviously seeing, the fascists go after many things, but they absolutely go after artists, academics, and experts because they want to control all the information.

Chee Although now it feels like they don't even want to control information, they just want to prevent other people from having it, like with the destruction of the weather service. I like knowing when storms are coming; I don't want to have to pay Elon Musk to know when storms are coming, thank you.

Brooks That's a great point. I don’t understand what the endgame is to all of this, unless it is, as you say, to give people like Musk and Bezos total control over our lives. To some large degree, these people simply don’t believe in society. They have this totally fantastical notion of the lone pioneer on the edge of the plain, totally self-reliant, and that's just not the world that we live in and it never will be again.

Chee It also never was.

Brooks Right.

Chee Let’s change the topic and talk about something more exciting. [laughs]

Brooks Of course! [laughs]

Chee You sent me some prompts, one of which was asking about favorite museums, galleries, exhibitions, and that stuck out to me and sparked some memories. I have this memory of going back to the museum I grew up with as a kid, which is the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. I went back as a grown person and realized that images from the permanent collection—paintings by Marsden Hartley and Wyeth—had made their way into my work.

Brooks Ah, tell me more about that.

Chee It’s something that goes back to 2008, when I interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin for Guernica. I remember something she said quite well: she said, when people talk to artists about their influences, usually the things that people bring up are aspirational, the work that they hope influenced them.

Brooks Ah.

Chee It made me laugh to think of that, but I was like that is very, very true.

Brooks So, who do you hope influenced you? [laughs]

Chee Oh no, I'm not gonna go there. [laughs] I'm more thinking of the people who actually did, because the evidence was for me, as far as I could see, in the collection. Going back made me think about the way art can come to inhabit you when you live with it a long time. When I was a student in high school, I would go and take art classes at the museum, and I would go in and walk through the collection, or sometimes we would have assignments to go around and to draw things that were there in the collection. And, objectively now looking back, this would have had an impact on me. But it didn't occur to me that this would be the impact. You know, you think of it as your education, and you might think in a more straightforward way I learned how to make this, I learned X fact, I learned this history, I learned about this process, but you don't maybe think this image will stay inside me for a very long time and it will transform a piece of writing that I will do decades later.

Brooks That’s wonderful. Learning to be an artist or a writer has a lot to do with some kind of craft, some kind of technical ability, but it also has to do with so much more than that that's inexplicable. Why you respond to a certain painting or a poem, why it stays with you, is not simply because it's very well balanced and or because it shows you how to use color, right?

Chee Right.

Brooks The things that I'm drawn to most are things where there is a tension between what is understood and what is not understood, what is just beyond comprehension, or just beyond my ability to grasp. And in a weird way, I think this comes back to why I don't give a fuck if AI can make a painting.

Chee Right.

Brooks Because it is the mystery that comes from creation that is interesting to me, and that's what sticks with me.

Chee Yes.

Brooks I’m looking at the Portland Museum of Art collection online now, looking at the Marsden Hartleys. There's one called Crashing Wave.

Chee Yes.

Brooks I love that one, and I love his work. In fact, I saw a fantastic Hartley a couple of days ago in San Diego that I've never seen before. And two of my paintings are hanging near his work right now at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, along with Beckmann, Kirchner, and Corinth. I feel very lucky.

Chee I feel very lucky to have had the collection in my childhood, you know, before I ever came out, to have been able to have the luck to go and look at his art.

Brooks How often did you go?

Chee I couldn't really tell you. In high school, I went once a week.

Brooks That's a lot!

Chee It was because the art classes were there, so that was where I went. There's a marble statue that you'll see there of a figure reclining backwards. [The Dead Pearl Diver, Benjamin Paul Akers, 1858]. It was right by one of the entrances and I passed it probably hundreds of times. I spent who knows how much time looking at that. It makes me think about how, especially as someone who is not particularly a visual artist, I've been very lucky to have seen a lot of tremendous art in different museums around the world, like in Portugal…although Portugal has such a funny set of museums.

Brooks How so?

Chee There's a certain kind of collection that a rich person makes.

Brooks It's a bit all over the place, is that what you mean?

Chee Yeah, it's a portrait of their taste. It's kind of like entering their psyche or entering maybe more of…some kind of prismatic projection of their unconscious, like what they think art is, what they think value is. Because a municipal museum would endeavor to show you a kind of historical record of all these things. I'm thinking of like, a really great show I saw recently in Mexico City, and how it was about the museum's history and its role in several art arguments over the last century.

Brooks Oh, wow. What museum was it?

Chee It was Museo de Arte Moderno.

Brooks That sounds amazing. I’m just going to text you an image of this Marsden Hartley that I saw last week at the San Diego Museum of Art, because it’s called Winter Wind, Maine Coast [1941]. [texts]

Chee Oh, it’s beautiful.

Brooks Isn’t it? Did you have a concept of Hartley as a gay man when you were in high school?

Chee Maybe, maybe not. That's a little hard for me. I would be guessing at this point.

Brooks But you might have?

Chee I feel like it was possible.

Brooks I suppose it depends on which Hartleys you see, because some are more explicitly gay looking than others, like Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy [1940].

Chee Yeah, that's an unforgettable one. I don’t think when I was young that they had much done about his being Queer.

Brooks Probably not.

Chee But they certainly do now.

Brooks I’ve never been to Maine, but I know a lot of artists who live there, and I recently met Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, who is the Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art. He’s one of us.

Chee Great.

Brooks What is the art scene like in Vermont?

Chee I would say I'm just now actually exploring and getting to know what's around me here. I live near the border of Vermont and New Hampshire. These little adventures that we've made in the last year in particular…the thing that I've discovered is that there are a lot of artists up here. I think I knew that already, but I’m learning that there was also a history of artists being up here. Last summer we went to Hall Art Foundation, which is a really great museum. It's a part of the MassMOCA network. It is really beautiful, very fun, and the landscape around the place is also quite nice. There’s a hill of apple trees, for example, and nobody seemed to mind us plucking a few and eating them.

Brooks How very New England. [laughs]

Chee There were no warnings saying not to. [laughs] There is also another great museum—which is part of the National Park Service, so I hope it will be safe—called Saint-Gaudens. One of my favorite places to go experience local art is a little store in Littleton, New Hampshire called Just L. My husband and I love going there; it’s a vintage shop, but they have a terrific eye for everything from the kind of junk store painting where it's like $25 to like rare work by Mexican and Filipino artists that has found its way into homes in the New Hampshire area. It's owned by these two gay men who have incredible taste. If you look at their Instagram account, you’ll see like everything from like a stack of blankets and quilts to fabulous contemporary furniture to what looks like a sled in the shape of an arrowhead. They’re pretty adventurous, and they always have a great display every winter that they sell, which is of those illuminated Santas and Christmas trees and nomads.

Brooks So, will these things be making it into your novel?

Chee Maybe, we'll see. One of them very sweetly at an auction came across an antique book about Korea. I do like going to stores like that, even if I don’t buy anything because there's a dream that settles over me when I do it.

Brooks Yes.

Chee And things come of that.

Brooks They do. Sometimes younger artists ask me for advice and one of the things I always say is that I can’t emphasize enough the importance of looking. You never know what will strike you and what will spark something, where inspiration will come from. A sled in the shape of an arrowhead could become a novel or could become a painting.

Chee Absolutely.

Brooks I wonder if we could talk about Sifnos, in Greece. I have also been there.

Chee Oh, sure. I went there for two summers, 2008 and 2009, along with friends from Amherst College who invited me to join them. They would create a sort of summer colony,  renting apartments somewhere near each other in the same little village. They'd been going for a lot longer, so people knew them and greeted them warmly and greeted us warmly by extension. We would stay in a town called Apollonia, which was more central than coastal. I rented the same place both times, and it was quite inexpensive. I think it was €60 a night.

Brooks Oh, wow.

Chee It was a two-bedroom apartment that had a balcony that overlooked this little Italian restaurant called Mamma Mia. And so I would joke that it was like the VIP lounge for Mamma Mia. [laughs] I don't know that I ever did this, but we were always saying that we could, if we wanted to, order food over the little fence. They would have done it if we wanted to, but it was always more fun to go into their restaurant and eat there. It was a time in my life when I realized that I was never really taking a vacation. I was never not working.

Brooks I see. I know that feeling.

Chee Right? It was also a period where I had gotten into a terrible grind for the second novel and was just sort of always writing that, or always writing an essay, always writing something, always teaching writing, but never just taking a rest. My Amherst friends would really go on vacation; they would really just stop working. And this included my friend Sabina Murray who is just a profoundly prolific novelist and she's like you have to take a vacation, it’s so important. So, a while back I wrote about Sifnos for The New York Times, writing about it being the island that wasn't famous, which isn't entirely true. The island is known for its cuisine; it's the birthplace of Nikólaos Tselementés, the chef who is thought of as the founder of what we consider to be contemporary Greek cooking. He sort of wrote the first Greek cookbook, was the first person to write down a lot of these recipes for an audience that was not Greek or that wasn’t meant to be passed on to your children. The heritage of the island itself was interesting to me because it was a mix of the Greek and the Italian, but specifically the Venetian, because it had been a Venetian colony. The town of Kastro does look as if Greeks created a Venetian town because when you stand outside and look at it, it's very beautiful, and it looks like a fairly ordinary “Greek” town, if also a beautiful one. But when you're walking through it, you instantly get lost in a maze of passages.

Brooks Yes, I have been there and remember that feeling of disorientation very well. It is really similar to Venice in that way.

Chee It's how they protected themselves, which fascinated me. There's also a beach down below called Seralia, which was a really tantalizing name for a beach because it means male harem. [laughs]

Brooks And did it live up to its name? [laughs]

Chee Unfortunately, no. [laughs]. But I did have some very enjoyable meals there at a restaurant called the Captain Sifakis, which was a little pub-slash-fish restaurant that was run by a family. There were two very handsome brothers who waited on all the tables, as well as their mom, and then their dad would go out on the boat and catch the fish that they served in the restaurant. So every day you would examine what had been caught before making your order, and you would get that fish with Greek salad that came with drunken goat cheese, the goat cheese that's been aged in wine.

Brooks Delicious.

Chee And the incredible herbs, you know, which were everywhere. I had never smelled what oregano was like in the wind before.

Brooks Yes.

Chee Oregano that had grown on a hill and then was roasted in the sun. And I loved all of the skinny little cats that were everywhere; I would feed some of them on my porch. And I love the little shapes that they made. I would go to a different beach every day and make a drawing to relax. I had rented a scooter, which sort of shocked my friends a little bit. [laughs] They would always think about it, but it always seemed too reckless and dangerous to do, but I was like, anyway, see you later. [laughs]

Brooks You were living.

Chee Yes, I was. I had driven a motorcycle in San Francisco for two years, so I felt comfortable on a motorized vehicle of that kind. And I love, love, loved the way I would be on that moped and these Greek men on their motorcycles would be coming around a curve in the opposite direction and wink at me. I was like, are you kidding me? So I was going to drive off the road. [laughs]  That was the real hazard of driving the scooter in Greece. [laughs]

Brooks And why, exactly, do you think they were winking at you?

Chee Oh, you know, there's just a kind of horny friendliness that I think is a part of the life of men there, regardless of their sexuality. Maybe I shouldn't downplay the possibility…I mean, I know from friends who were cruising at the beaches that there were certainly enthusiastic men to be found there. I wasn't one of the cruisers, but I wish I had been. [laughs] I have regrets, ugh! [laughs]

Brooks Yes, I understand that. [laughs]

Chee I was single at the time, and it would have been a perfectly fine way to spend an afternoon but I didn’t do that. But I do remember the friendliness of the place. It's a small island, right? People would walk into a restaurant or a café and they would just shout Kalimera to the whole room, who would shout it back. It wasn't really the kind of place to go with like a laptop.

Brooks Right.

Chee It was certainly was a place that you wanted to see some life. And I think it was good for me to shed the taking of my Apple laptop with me everywhere, checking email, writing, blah blah, blah, kind of bullshit life that had incrementally moved in on me at the time. I was just going  out there and being a little more of a happy animal in my body, in the sunshine with a beer and a pen.

Brooks Yes. Part of the joy of being on vacation and being in a place like that is that you have fewer obligations or no obligations, but the character of a place and its people affect you, too. It sounds like such a cliché, but in a place like Sifnos, there is time and space and appreciation for simple and perfect things like sunshine and fresh food and herbs and cold beer. And quiet.

Chee Yeah.

Brooks I’ve been to Greece about ten times, and was in Sifnos for a week or so in 2016. When I go to Greece, my agenda is simple: reading, sleeping, eating, drinking, swimming, walking, some minimal cultural attractions if they’re around. I’ve traveled with friends, and for some people that kind of checking out is really daunting, but by the third or fourth day when you realize, oh, I'm not sure what day of the week it is, everyone is on board.

Chee Right, right, right.

Brooks I haven't had one of those vacations for a few years. I desperately need one.

Chee Me too. My husband and I are trying to figure out how to live like that more.

Brooks Where would you go?

Chee Good question. I miss Florence terribly. I had the good luck to spend three Junes teaching there for NYU’s creative writing program. It was located in the stunning Villa La Pietra, about one mile outside of the city. Well, not really outside of the city, but more on the hill above it. NYU would rent apartments for us and we would teach class twice a week and then we had a lot of time to ourselves. I liked being in a place for a month, to really be there.

Brooks Yes.

Chee There are places I've been that my husband hasn't been yet that I want to bring him to like Lisbon and Porto in Portugal. I can imagine renting an apartment there for a month. I also need to go back to Korea, back to Seoul. I think we've fallen a bit into the trap of doing a lot of family travel, but we don't make plans for our own pleasures.

Brooks The pleasure trip is different than a family trip, no matter how much you love your family.

Chee Yeah.

Brooks Especially if you're trying to get winked at by Greek men. [laughs]

Chee Yes. [laughs] Sifnos is another place that Dustin wants to go to very much. We also had a great time in Mexico City recently, and I would love to go back there.

Brooks As much as I’ve traveled, I've never been, but it’s at the top of my list.

Chee The art scene there is really phenomenal…

Brooks That's what everyone says.

Chee…the mix of museums, and galleries, and working artists. It was interesting seeing how contemporary Mexico's relationship to its past was created, in a way, in relationship to presenting the country for the [1968] Olympics. Going out to visit the pyramids and learning about this from the guides, as well as the stunning, stunning Museo de Historia. That is a definite don't miss, and a lot of the story is there, too.

Brooks One of the questions I often ask visual artists is what music they listen to when they work. When I’m painting, I listen to all sorts of music, but when I’m writing, I can only listen to classical music, or music without lyrics. Do you listen to music when you write?

Chee I do sometimes listen to music while I write. I create different playlists. Right now, I made one for this new novel and it's pretty funny, so far, if I can say that.

Brooks The novel or the playlist?

Chee Both!

Brooks Great! What’s on the playlist?

Chee Let’s see. There are two Rufus Wainwright songs: Going To A Town and The Art Teacher…

Brooks Oh, I love both of those songs, but The Art Teacher…

Chee …is really magnificent.

Brooks It’s one of my all-time favorite songs. Sometimes, I can't handle it. Those last lines just kill me:

All this having been done, a Turner - I own one / Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing, /  Thinking of the art teacher / I was just a girl then; / Never have I loved since then / No, never have I loved any other man.

The will of a person to hold on to something that means so much to them from such a young age. You know, owning a Turner is no small feat.

Chee Yeah.

Brooks And then Never have I loved since then / No, never have I loved any other man, and the way the notes crescendo, it's just so strong. And that gets back to what you were saying earlier about being young and going to the Portland Museum and how deeply imprinted these things are in inside of us.

Chee Yes. The novel, for example, is set in 2006 to 2008 with trips back in time to the 80s and the 90s, and I was at the gym and I just started looking up popular songs from 2006, 2007, 2008 to try to jog memories, because the memories become fodder for the material.

Brooks Yes.

Chee Because the smaller details are harder to remember. And I wanted to remember the contextual details; I remember when nightlife got so boring in the 90s, for example. And then suddenly there was electroclash and everything was fun again, and I was like, OK, here I am, going back to Brooklyn to breathe dry ice in a bar and jump around with a bunch of people I don't know and flirt with boys. And I thought I'd given that up and then I was back. And also what struck me was there was a certain kind of breakup song that became really popular, usually sung by a vengeful woman.

Brooks Interesting.

Chee It was the beginning of Rihanna, you know, you can stand under my umbrella. It was the beginning not so much of her career, but her fame, like where she just kind of took hold of the culture by the neck and didn't let go. So, I was at the gym, where I work out here, and I realized that this music they were playing was really from a while ago, and it was all music from like exactly the same era. I remember thinking at times that wow, somebody had a break up a long time ago that they did not get over and they are in charge of this playlist and they are not going to let us stop listening to it [laughs] I don't know what's going on there, but it was a hilarious coincidence. I don't know what it means. I don't know if working out at the gym has unconsciously brought this novel to the fore for me, but maybe it has.

Brooks Wow, I love that.

Chee I was like, oh I remember Justin Timberlake, as I’m doing my reps. [laughs]

Other Swans conversation No. Two

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.