Art by Rana Roosevelt
Interview Questions by Claire Tang
Interview Answers by William Du, Ramona McNish, and Raen Kao
Polyphony Lit's Volume 20 Fall Issue is now live, and for this issue, we're offering an exclusive behind-the-scenes look! Join our editors for conversations with William Du (the author of "Chinese Dinner Table in Four Expressionist Styles"), Ramona McNish (the author of "August at the End"), and Raen Kao (the author of "Papaya Bowl").
Interview with William Du
Author of "Chinese Dinner Table in Four Expressionist Styles"
Claire: “I marvel / at how a body can be both a weapon / and home” is such a powerful, poignant line, especially the way you used it in the context of a mother eating fish. What does a body being both a weapon and a home mean to you on a personal level? How did you come to include this line within your piece?
William: When I wrote this line, I was thinking about the contrast a person’s body holds: its ability for intimacy, warmth and nurture, but also its capacity for defence, for harm, for resilience. On a personal level, I believe I carry such opposing forces, and the people in my family do as well. I admire my grandparents’ kindness and warmth, but also their fierce determination to bring my family where it is today. The body is a site of nourishment but also embodies the harsh reality of survival, the act of consumption.
Claire: At the end of the fourth poem, “zha yu,” the narrator seems to grieve something that they “can never have” : “the ghost sound of an alphabet” and “pieces of memory that aren’t mine.” What is being grieved in these lines? And does the dish “zha yu” connect to it?
William: These lines touch on the feeling of diaspora and the absence of an all-encompassing Asian American identity. The “ghost sound” and “pieces of memory that aren’t mine” embody a feeling of cultural schizophrenia, grasping fragments of heritage, family stories, and history that never fully belong. Chewing through a fried fish is like chewing through a story, struggling to process its bones and body but ultimately basking in its warmth and comfort.
Claire: As the title suggests, each poem in this collection embodies a different style and form, such as “asparagus” being written through a series of ten couplets, and “zha yu” being written in a free verse. How did you come to decide the structure of each poem?
William: The structure of each poem emerged organically, influenced by emotion and gut feeling. These poems started out separately, and I eventually pieced them together along a common theme. For “asparagus,” the ten couplets create a sense of precision and pairing, which mirrors the delicacy and detail of the vegetable. In contrast, “zha yu” flows more freely, which I felt suited the looseness of memory, the way it can drift and blur. The goal was to let the form enhance the mood and meaning of each piece, almost like how the preparation of a dish can change its flavor and texture.
Claire: What’s one piece of advice you would offer a young writer?
William: What would your writing be if you took out all outside external motivation? Everything outside of writing for yourself doesn’t really matter.
William Du is a man of few words.
Interview with Ramona McNish
Author of "August at the End"
Claire: I’d love to know how you came to write. Do you remember the first poem you wrote? What inspires your writing?
Ramona: I always loved books and started trying to copy them and write books when I was eight or nine. I liked poetry too, but it felt very serious, and adult, and sort of inscrutable to me. Most of the poems that I got to read at that age were very old and seemed universally known by adults, in a way that made them feel like scripture to me. I remember trying to sit down and write a serious, non-rhyming poem when I was maybe eleven. I had transferred to a new school for the sixth grade and needed to write something to prove to my best friend I missed her. It was about jumping over waves at the beach.
Claire: “August at the End” is full of such rich imagery that hints at violence and war. Is there historical context to this piece, such as a particular war that it is portraying? If so, what inspired you to write about that time period or war?
Ramona: When I wrote this poem I had just finished reading two books: The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean-Greer, and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Both novels feature men who attempt to dodge separate drafts in various ways. I was interested in how draft-dodging interacts with American ideas of courage and masculinity, especially for teenage boys who have such swagger and are so interested in coming off as nonchalant. How do those pretenses dissolve when actually faced with death? How do they stick around? I think I chose to set it pre-Vietnam because that felt like a time where gender roles and patriotism would be more rigid. If I had to guess, it would be about the 1950-1953 draft for the Korean war, but I didn’t really have that in mind while writing.
Claire: “Our men were never very good by the light of day” is one of my favorite lines of this poem. What does this line mean to you?
Ramona: I think I was playing with two ideas. I wanted to think about the way that we talk about men who go away to war, and how they’re mythologized and so heavily respected in American culture, despite the type of violence they might commit overseas. They’re heroic through a lens of patriotism, but not always in objective harsh light. And then the fact that the men who were staying and playing baseball, were, for whatever reason, the draft rejects. I imagined the team consisting of mostly older men or injured young men. Maybe not so athletic-looking in sunlight, but able-bodied enough to project onto in the dark.
Claire: Both Billy and the narrator feel like such carved-out characters for the short amount of time we, as readers, spend with them. How did you find ways to characterize Billy and the narrator throughout your poem? How did you decide which details to include?
Ramona: I was really just trying to write a stereotype of americana, and messing around with how much I could turn it up and down while keeping the characters sympathetic. I thought a lot about jokes I would tell my boyfriend at the time, about him being all-american and boy-scouty. I think a lot of the things that ended up staying in the poem were pretty universal, haircuts, and sports, and lying. They’re just teenagers, and that’s kind of essential to the emotion I was trying to portray.
Ramona McNish now attends Bates College. She does not write poetry anymore, she writes many essays.
Interview with Raen Kao
Author of "Papaya Bowl"
Claire: There are many symbols placed throughout “Papaya Bowl.” The lime seems to represent your father’s Taiwanese culture, the papaya embodies your mother’s Cantonese culture, and the bowl represents the mixing of these two cultures: you. But I also noticed another possible symbol that felt more ambiguous in its representation: the weighted blanket. So, what does the weighted blanket mean to you?
Raen: The way loved ones cope with one’s mental illness. This piece was written for a time when I was suicidal, and my boarding school had to send me home for more intensive mental health care. Large sensory inputs, like the kind that come from weighted blankets, are often used to keep someone with a mental illness grounded.
When writing the piece, I wanted to focus on my relationship with my parents more than the angst of my suicidal ideation. So, the weighted blanket came to represent both the tension physically keeping me from touching my parents and my father’s acknowledgement of my circumstances.
Claire: Each vignette in “Papaya Bowl” begins with a new word. How did you come to structure your piece in this way? And what does each word mean in the context of the vignette they head?
Raen: Each number is followed by its transliterated version in Cantonese. I wanted to emphasize my mother’s voice as the one structuring the piece, as well as the associations some numbers have in general Chinese culture.
One and two represent my parents, three represent me. This can be interpreted a number of ways–first, second, and third gender; first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants; the sun, the moon, and the earth (clay). Four represents death. That vignette addresses the tension; it introduces the weighted blanket. This is the climax of the piece. It’s disconcerting and sudden. Five, six, and seven don’t function as indicators of their respective vignettes; I use them to structure the denouement. Eight means fortune, it marks the beginning of resolution. Nine is the first time I use Taiwanese transliteration. “Kao” is my and my father’s family name. It means “tall” or “great.” It’s the first time in the piece I think of reaching up.
Claire: Your piece is a gorgeous exploration of the intersection and mixing of your Cantonese and Taiwanese cultures. It touches on the sweet, sour, salty, bright, and dark aspects of this multiculturalism in a genuine yet confessional way. In what other ways do your Cantonese and Taiwanese cultures intersect, divulge, and shape your life? How do you think this impacts your writing?
Raen: My parents speak English at home; their dialects and Mandarin accents are too different for them to comfortably understand each other. Even growing up in Hong Kong, surrounded by Cantonese speakers, I only ever learned English. I’ve learned some Beijing-standardized Mandarin in school, but not enough to know how to write or communicate effectively in any Chinese dialect, Taiwanese or Cantonese. So, unable to understand my mother’s tongue, I write in English. To me, multiculturalism is just as much about gaining perspective as it is losing direct connection, and that marks the way I express myself.
Claire: What is something that you would like to ask your readers before and after they read your story? What do you hope your readers leave with after reading this piece?
Raen: Who do you come from? What have you been unable to inherit from them?
I hope my readers question their intergenerational relationships, why the rifts that exist were formed, and think towards ways they can heal that gap.
Raen graduated from St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH in 2024 and is now a member of Brown ‘29. Named after monsoon season and the desire to be a cawing black void, they can usually be found sweeping through history museums and poking at shiny rocks.
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