Souvankham Thammavongsa: On Wanting, Writing the Truth and Her Short Story Collection, "How to Pronounce Knife"
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife, is a careful and honest look into the lives of Laos immigrants in the Western world. By exploring their everyday moments, we are exposed to their experiences of classism, sexism, and racism that make up their daily lives. These stories also show how work shapes the immigrant identity and experience, and how this comes with a level of invisibility and isolation.
Souvankham speaks with truth and prose that leaves you constantly hungry for more. I devoured this collection with fervency. I spoke with Souvankham via email where she discusses how wanting something can feel radical, writing the truth in her work, capturing small moments, and this fabulous debut collection, How to Pronounce Knife.
The stories in How to Pronounce Knife explore everyday life for Laos immigrants in the Western world. Everyday moments of racism, the contrast of power and privilege, sexism, how work shapes their identity and adapting to life in America. But you also withhold a lot from the reader. The moments captured in these stories are restrained. I loved this choice as a reader but I would love to know your thought process around it.
I thought of writing these stories the way we watch someone doing backflips and making leaps on a narrow balance beam. There isn't much to know except that moment. I want every move I make to matter. I want readers to feel they are in the presence of someone who is not going to waste a second of their time, and who will tell you exactly what you need to know, and only the truth.
Stories of refugees and immigrants as often not shared in American literature. Was creating these stories a response to that? Was there an initial spark that prompted you to write this collection?
Or the few books we do know about go on and on about the author’s life outside the writing, we often get distracted from noticing there is a book at all. Or the stories are only ever sad or humiliating but don’t have much emotional range. Someone handling these same themes might say they write for the voiceless and unseen and unheard, or that they want to speak for people. It might be true for some writers, but I am not that interesting or ambitious. I grew up in a neighborhood where it was not a big deal to be a refugee. I was around Lao people who were rambunctious and so incredibly loud--it wouldn't be right to call them unheard or unseen or voiceless. I really just wrote this book because I want to. Wanting to do something doesn't sound all that radical or grand--but it is to me. The simplicity and the audacity of that want. I think a good book is really just a good book and it never goes out of style. I wanted to write a good book.
There are a number of child narrators throughout these stories. They grapple with their understanding and impression of their parents or the adults around them as they are sort of floating in between cultures. Can you speak about writing from a child's perspective? What you enjoyed about it, or what drew you to capture that voice?
The stories are stripped of sentiment and romance. They don't shy away from being brutal about everyone. It was difficult to write from a child’s perspective because we don’t allow children their intelligence of noticing. In many of the stories, when we realize the narrator is an adult, we grieve the child we thought they were and grieve further because they didn’t have a childhood. I am actually interested in the adult voice. How after all these years we are still the child there in the language we use to describe that time.
“Randy Travis” was one of my absolute favorites from this collection. I thought it was brilliant. I’m interested to know the origin of that story.
That really means a lot to me to see you say. Thank you! I am earnestly a fan of Randy Travis’s music. I heard his music at weddings and that was the closest we ever got to seeing a concert. I remember young Lao men in bands of their own and how famous they were to my family and I wanted to give that feeling to a reader. This story is often just described as "sad" but I am up to much more than that. The whole time we are longing for this man who boxes store furniture to take center stage and sing. He is not famous, but I put him at center stage in my story. I make him famous. That was fantastic fun. The story is also about turning the phrase “Go Back Home” into something meaningless and so utterly powerless. I rob it of its power to wound. It is a daring narrative move.
This is your first short story collection after publishing four collections of poetry. I’d love to know how poetry informs your short fiction. Were there any particular challenges you faced when switching genres?
I try to make the short stories be their own individual thing. If you are encountering the writing for the first time, I leave that for you to own. I do not force you to watch me work somewhere else. You don’t need to know that I wrote four poetry books or that I write poetry—and I don’t use the poetry I wrote or lean on their achievements and I don’t cheapen things for the reader by recycling the themes or topics in the poetry I’ve written. Each book and form has remained distinct and individual. I make things harder for myself this way, but I like that.
How long did it take you to write this short story collection? Do you keep a particular writing routine?
Some stories took a long time to think about, but then just an afternoon to write. Others took a few seconds to think about but then twelve years to write. I don’t think too much about the writing routine—it isn't as serious as brain surgery! I just do it, and that takes up the time thinking about the routine and what that might involve.
What has your writing journey looked like? Did you always want to be a writer?
I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but growing up I didn't know anyone who was. If I wanted to work at a chicken processing plant or pick worms or box furniture, I knew people who could get me in. So I just learned to pay attention and to read on my own, and I went to work like everyone else in the world. I worked for fifteen years as a research assistant for an investment advice newsletter. I also counted bags of cash five levels below the ground for a big bank. I prepared taxes. Whatever I did, writing was always on my mind. I never forgot what I wanted even if what I did was far from what I wanted.
Are you working on anything new right now?
Buying groceries, and writing a novel. Those things sure take up a lot of time.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, a New York Times Editors' Choice, out now with McClelland & Stewart (Canada), Little, Brown (U.S.), and Bloomsbury (U.K.). Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, NOON, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, and O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto where she now lives.
