5 Questions with Aurelia Guo
Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher based in London. She is a lecturer in law at London South Bank University.
She is the author of the book of poetry and essays, World of Interiors (Divided, 2022) and of the poetry chapbooks, 2016 (After Hours Ltd, 2016) and NYT (Gauss PDF, 2018).
No.1
World of Interiors is a very specific and intentional book. How long did you take to write it and what compelled you to finish it? I noticed that in some of your essays you mention the year 2022, which made me wonder if you appended that pre-publication.
I wrote World of Interiors between November 2019, when I signed a contract with Divided, and February 2022. Writing the book was an iterative process, with some pieces finished earlier, and others only finished in the lead-up to publication.
No.2
The connections you draw when discussing class, gender, and minoritised/racialised identity are often surprising—it seems disparate at first, but then forms a map of your thinking. As an essayist myself I think that these connections can either be traces of our unconscious or a result of more reading than writing, but I wonder what the research and thinking process was like for you when you were writing the book.
I did research for different parts of the book in different ways. I’m more or less always collecting material that I feel I can re-work in poetry or collage, which is how I made the poetry chapbooks NYT and 2016.
Parts of World of Interiors were constructed this way: I’m sure this is partly a reflection of what I’m interested in, consciously and unconsciously. I have also been a doctoral student since 2017 and reading and writing academically for the last five years.
I would say that part of what drives me to write poetry and essays is a desire to think about subjects, including identity, outside of the more conventional ways in which they are often discussed. I like preserving my process of reading and thinking as part of my work.
No.3
You’re a lecturer in law, and in the past a text-based artist/performer too. How do you think the book is connected to these aspects of yourself, if at all?
I would say the book has emerged out of my experiences as a researcher and a teacher, which are more recent experiences, and that it has also emerged out of my experiences as an artist of some kind, which are older experiences.
Writing builds on those experiences while also being an opportunity to exist outside of those roles and expectations, though it comes with expectations of other kinds. Writing does offer some continuity with text-based art and performance I did in the past.
No.4
When I was reading World of Interiors, I felt like I was reading a scrapbook of your mind—even though I don’t know you—because you somehow invite the reader into your interiority through your life experiences alongside whatever you’ve read both in print and online. This is on top of the fact that the book does not easily sit in one genre: it’s not an essay collection, not poetry, and sometimes there are entire quotes either from you or others taking up one page. Can you speak more to this?
I’m glad World of Interiors feels intimate, and immediate, to some degree. I read, and I write, because I want to access something that I can’t access outside of those activities. I’m also glad the formal experiments make the book feel more accessible, not less accessible.
No.5
You explore the tensions around class and race throughout World of Interiors, which continues to get murkier in a time of increased racial capitalism, particularly for those of us coded as East Asians. “Representation”, but at what cost? The “Australia” you lived in in the 90s through to the early 2010s is probably very different to the one now as a result. I wonder if you’d like to expand more on this.
I wrote a lot of the book during COVID-19 lockdowns in London in 2020 and 2021. The pandemic made class and race differences feel extremely apparent. At the same time, COVID-19 made social transformation feel possible.
I felt immensely hopeful about the mass protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. It feels like we are still living through an intense period of struggle over what the world will look like in the future.
What it means to be perceived as Chinese has been so different in my experience, and I’m sure it will continue to change and change again. I’m keen to visit Sydney and Melbourne again when I can. I’m trying to see flux as a reason for hope, even as world events are what they are.
(Credit: Hagar Tenenbaum)
“In World of Interiors I use collage and appropriation to destabilise the first-person ‘I’. I also write directly about the inescapable condition of being perceived and positioned by other people. Our lives take place in time and space, meaning in history and geography, as well as in relation to one another – not just interpersonally, but intergenerationally, with all the baggage of race, class, gender and nation that this implies. I write about economic cycles of wealth and poverty at the levels of the individual, group and state. The book is about travel and immigration: migrants, tourists and refugees. It is about the work of survival and the cost of survival. It is also a hopeful book – about how strong and indomitable the will can be.”
Get it from Divided Publishing here.