On the 10th of November 2008 the second winner of the largest literary prize for a writer under the age of 30 was announced in a ceremony in the Brangwyn Hall. Nam Le, author of the breathtaking short story collection The Boat claimed the £60,000 prize from the short-listed group of outstanding young writers. Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, and his stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American Voices, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. He was described by the judges as a ‘phenomenal literary talent,’ and his popularity and reputation as one of the world’s finest young writers continues to flourish. On his recent visit to Swansea University, Swansea Review editor Dr. Fflur Dafydd probed him about the short story form, literary authenticity and becoming a subject of critical writing.

Nam Le and Dr. Fflur Dafydd with BA Creative Writing Students

It’s very rarely that you find a young writer bringing out a collection of short stories as a first publication, without first having published a novel. How did this decision come about?

To be honest, it wasn’t a conscious decision, but more a combination of circumstance and serendipity and fluke. I had written a novel and had come to the conclusion that I needed to ditch it, and had started writing these stories in conjunction with beginning a writer’s programme. I hadn’t even read that many short stories at the time…I’d read Chekhov and Maupassant, but I hadn’t had any proper immersion in the form, so when I arrived in America, my mind just exploded. I was reading practitioners of short stories I’d never heard of, and immediately fell in love with the form. What better way to move away from the novel, I thought, to try something new, and go somewhere with my writing feeling that I had nothing to lose at all. It was actually a liberating and exhilarating time, trying these new things out, not even really knowing what the inherent limitations of the form were. Also, it was a different experience in terms of the expectation. I think that novels inherently have a commercial shadow cast over them, but short stories are a more pure form of the enterprise because people expect so little from them, in a way. So it was nice not feel any pressure from any quarters at all, apart from what the form itself demanded of me.

You’ve written about several locations in your collection that you’ve never visited – Hiroshima, for example. Is this something that interests you – toying with the idea of authenticity, of trying to ‘capture’ a place through not having been there, showing the power of narrative to engage a reader, to create optical illusions, and bridge the gap? How much research goes into your work?

This drive toward authenticity – a truth that is somehow apart from the words on the page itself, between the words, beneath them – is something that I find really interesting. Nowadays we hunger even more for this sense of some external a priori of authenticity in our work, and on the one hand, as a fiction writer, I don’t want that to have anything to do with my work at all – I want my work to speak solely and comprehensively for itself. It seems ludicrous that the work would have to be judged by different standards, based on who the author is, where they’re coming from, whether they’ve been to the places they’re writing about, or whether or not they have the right to write about these experiences. In terms of research, I feel strongly that had I been to some of the geographical places depicted in the book, I could not say I’d been to the same place that appears in these stories as they stand, because you can never separate a place from the subjectivity through which it’s being viewed. The Hiroshima which is being seen through the eyes of a 7 year old girl in 1945 is extremely different to the Hiroshima that I would see today. And to be honest, if I had some conversion with modern day Hiroshima, it would take a fair amount of shunting aside to really capture what I felt to be the important aspects of the Hiroshima in the story. Some people think that there are necessary or sufficient details which are essential in reaching the ‘heart’ of the place – but if you think about it, it’s impossible.

If you were to ask everyone in a room what was necessary to capture the essence of that room, then everyone would come up with a different set of details, so the idea that the writer has a responsibility to capture a place, or to represent it doesn’t ring true for me. I don’t ever try to get a place ‘right’ – I try to do it justice. I try to capture the mood or the rhythm or feel of a place, and rather than try to capture the essence of a place, I try to capture an essence. In terms of the actual research itself, I think that often creative writing research often draws more deeply and widely than critical scholarship, critical scholarship doesn’t capture so much of the extraneous, superfluous detail. In creative writing, for example, reading travel guides, documentaries, things that maybe don’t have any inherent academic value, personal testimonies, blogs etc. are crucial for finding some details which support a creative work, and help conjure things like elements like speech, the angle of the light, or the eccentricities of people’s thinking. That to me is the meat of good fiction. But the danger with research is that you can spend too much of a novel or a story trying to prove your authority. A lot of what you know should stay beneath the surface. To return to the Hiroshima story; at the time of writing it, I became much more knowledgeable about the political, economic and social circumstances of that time, and the implications of what had happened on August 6th, but at the same time, the story doesn’t go into any of that at all, because the character is a 7 year old girl. She doesn’t know any of that stuff but it is somehow in there, dormant – I don’t want it to be in there too bluntly. Part of the point of creative writing is to get rid of all elements of the research, no matter how extensive it is.

You’ve already been ‘written about’ by several critics, and will no doubt continue to be the subject of many scholarly articles. How do you feel about being a subject of critical writing?

People have shown interest in teaching me – for me that falls into the same category as any kind of feedback. A lot of writers have an instinctive and strong reaction against any kind of appraisal of literary work, the aesthetic mode of literature, but I don’t feel that at all, there’s an enormous amount of insight that can be gleaned from looking at a work from those angles, but it’s the same with anything, it’s always the lax and loose and lazy examples of both creative writing & research that gives it a bad name – so to me, good critical writing is as entertaining, and insightful and authoritative as creative writing. Ideally you want your work to be smarter than you are. You want to be the druid gate keeper to this mystical world that has more resonance and meaning than you yourself can articulate, so what you’re doing is you’re encrypting and encoding words in a way that the reader or the scholar can partake in that process.

Have you been surprised by some things that have been written about you? Do you feel that you’ve in some way learnt new things about yourself or your work – have you been given the answer to some questions that have plagued you as a writer?

Certainly, yes. I had a really interesting experience where a lady from a Christian review, who liked the stories a fair bit, wrote this review that was very positive, but rather strange in terms of the fact that it stated how the stories are replete with Christian iconography and symbolism, and how much of the narrative development and the emotional development of the characters had religious significance. I remember thinking at the time that she stated this rather explicitly and that wasn’t how I saw it at all. But you really have abdicate that connection between yourself and your critics, no matter who they are or what they write – because who knows what goes into your work, who knows what feeds it and fertilises, and to me, I read that as being an awareness or an openness to a very first principle type of spirituality, which I think could arguably be said to be present in my stories. This wasn’t perhaps something I’d thought about or planned, or calibrated at all, but it was just something that she pointed out. And the parent child thing is something else people have pointed out; that many of my stories are to do with fraught relationships between parents and children. And I thought that was an interesting reading, which certainly made me think deeper about what I’d written.

In 2009, Nam Le will undertake a writer’s residency at: UEA in Norwich, where he will be working on his first novel. He will also take part in a one-day conference on creative writing at the University of Wales conference centre, an event scheduled for late Spring 2009.