5 Questions with Paige Clark
Paige Clark is a Chinese/American/Australian fiction writer, researcher and teacher. Her fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Meniscus and New World Writing. In 2019, she was runner-up for the Peter Carey Short Story Award and shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award. She has her Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing from the University of Melbourne, where she is currently at work on her PhD. Her research addresses the relationship between race, craft and the teaching of creative writing.
Her first book, She Is Haunted, was published in July 2021 by Allen & Unwin.
(credit: Marcelle Bradbeer)
No.1
Can you tell us about the writing process behind your debut short story collection, She is Haunted? What inspired its conception?
I wrote She Is Haunted over a span of eight years. I am a snail; in the beginning, I only completed one or two stories per year. I was learning how to write—I’m still learning how to write—so there was no process per se but a searching for a process.
Sometimes I would work on a story word by word, sentence by sentence, until I had a hundred words. Other times I could finish an entire story in a day. I’ve found no single method is better than any other, though some approaches feel better. If I write slowly, the writing process is painstaking, but the editing process is straightforward. If I write quickly, for a moment, I believe writing is easy and then am undone in the editing. I prefer work done at a snail’s pace, but my pleasure has no reflection on the quality of the final output. This is something I’ve learned with much dissatisfaction about writing; I will never know how it works, and it will never be fun.
But what inspires me to start, and what inspired me to finish She is Haunted, is this dogged belief that I have that I must write. Amy Hempel’s first collection of stories is titled Reasons to Live. That always seemed to me like the most logical explanation for why you should tell a story. In other words, I wrote this book to keep myself alive, and it worked.
No.2
You have said elsewhere that your work has been described as ‘not being Asian enough’, and later, an agent suggested that you make She Is Haunted ‘more Chinese’. This is a problem that many writers of colour face, an absurdity that assumes we think about ‘being [insert ethnicity here]’ all the time, and which dictates certain ways to ‘be’. How do you think you attempted to navigate this perceived dissonance in your stories?
The primary way I navigated this perceived dissonance was through an acceptance of my limitations as a writer. I have no desire to research characters or write experiences wildly outside of my own. This is not necessarily a critique of those who do that kind of work, but rather an acknowledgement of what kind of writer I am or am willing to be. I could only make the stories in the book as Chinese as I am. Though how ridiculous it is to have to quantify one’s identity like that in the first place!
On a technical level, in the stories where Chinese identity is integral to the premise, then identity came into play. As the question here implies, there are times in fiction when characters are simply not sitting around thinking about their ethnic background. Many of the stories in the collection revolve around illness and grief. Never once have I visited someone in a hospital room and thought, ‘oh, I feel so Chinese today.’ There is absolutely no capacity for that kind of reflection in that setting.
For example, in the story, ‘Times I’ve Wanted to Be You’, the narrator, a fictionalised version of myself, does not reflect on her Chinese heritage at all; she is too preoccupied with the illness and death of her husband. Later in the book, there is a reprise of one of the hospital scenes in ‘Times I’ve Wanted to Be You’ in ‘The Cranes’. This story features a white narrator who observes a character that is a fictionalised version of myself in the hospital room. In this scenario, it made sense to me that the white character would recognise the presence of an East Asian woman in the room. Any decision I made about what or what not to include was based on what I thought best served the work, not what was best understood by the industry or by a hypothetical audience.
No.3
What writers inspired you while you were writing She Is Haunted, and why?
I am a huge fan of Weike Wang’s short stories and her novel, Chemistry. I often write stories in response to another story; ‘Private Eating’ is my love letter to Wang’s story ‘Omakase’.
One of my favourite short story writers is the aforementioned Amy Hempel, who just so happened to provide editorial assistance to Amy Tan on The Joy Luck Club. When I edited the collection, I pretended that I was Tan, and that Hempel was urging me along. In fact, I admire many writers named Amy: Amy Tan, Amy Hempel, Aimee Bender and Amy Bloom.
A collection I kept going back to during the writing process (and will keep going back to) is Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light. To me, what makes a short story collection great is when the writer’s voice comes through in every single story. Nobody does this better than van Neerven. Yet, at the same time, Heat and Light is an expansive collection that goes to unexpected and delightful places. When writing, I ask myself, how do I sound like me and still surprise the reader? Heat and Light showed me how to do both things. A masterclass.
No.4
The collection is a wonderful exploration of relationships, particularly those which are complicated and hard to parse. For example, in ‘Lie-In’, two East Asian women are both friends and competitors, while ‘What We Deserve’ looks at the complexities inherent in many mother-daughter relationships. Can you speak more to this?
Oh, I think you’ve picked up on something that I’ve never even noticed about my own work! In childhood, I had an unhealthy, enmeshed relationship with my mother. So much of my life since then has been an untangling from her. Perhaps due to this, I have always only understood myself relationally.
In Nora Okja Keller’s [novel] Comfort Woman, a mother asks her daughter how the daughter will ever know how much the mother loves her if the daughter does not have a child herself. No other question has ever summed up my relationship with my mother more. I am the daughter who does not understand—will never understand—her mother’s complicated love. In one of my stories, ‘Safety Triangle’, the narrator asks, ‘how can I be a mother when I don’t know how to be a daughter?’ It is my response to the question posed by Keller. This kind of inquiry drives the collection; it drives me as a writer more generally. How can I be a daughter? A lover? A friend? A rival even? And the answers are inherently complicated, impossible to locate. But the attempts to answer make up so much of what I try to capture in my work—how we define ourselves through how we are received or not by others.
No.5
What’s next for you, writing-wise?
More stories. There are always more stories. I also have a dream of being a better poet than I am. Earlier this year, I bought Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel but abandoned the cause after a few days. I am not sure if I want to write a novel, ever. Maybe a very short one.
Like I said, I am a snail. Now that my book is out in the world I can retreat back into my shell for a time and decide what I need to write next before I poke my head out again. Writing is always that for me; it is always about need.
Find out more
She Is Haunted is Paige Clark’s debut short story collection. With piercing insights into transnational Asian identity, intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog, Paige Clark has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction. Full of wit and humour, She Is Haunted announces an entrancing new literary voice as contemporary as it is unique. The collection has been shortlisted for the 2021 Readings New Australian Fiction Prize.
Now out with Allen & Unwin, or find it in all good bookstores.