Poet Mông-Lan's Creative Career

Mông-Lan

By Alita Byrd
Special to FYI Online

"Home is where my cat is," says poet, artist, and teacher Mông-Lan. "She's with me now in Tokyo."

Neither Mông-Lan nor her cat have been in Tokyo for long. They arrived in July, just in time to prepare for this academic year with UMUC–Asia. Mông-Lan is Vietnamese by birth, but grew up and became an artist in the United States. Now she teaches a course in creative writing to a class made up mostly of adults—mainly American military personnel stationed at the Yokota Air Base in Tokyo.

But Mông-Lan's new home in Tokyo will only be her home until early in 2003, when she will travel to her native Vietnam, sponsored by a Fulbright grant.

It seems UMUC–Asia was lucky to hire Mông-Lan even for this short time. At just 33, she has never been one to stay in one place for long. But wherever she is, she seems to accomplish a tremendous amount, raking in awards for her art and poetry.

Mông-Lan's first book, Song of the Cicadas, won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press, awarded to only one book each year. That book was also a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award in 2001 and it won the Great Lakes College Association's New Writers Award for Poetry. Poems from Song of the Cicadas and from two later—as yet unpublished—books have been published in numerous journals and magazines. One long poem, "Trail," is included in Best American Poetry of 2002, edited by Robert Creeley.

According to one of her reviewers, "Mông-Lan conveys the certainty that even when the world stops making sense, decency and beauty somehow survive. From Saigon to San Francisco, she combines the earthly and the ecstatic, the animal and the sublime, to create lyrics that tempt and haunt."

Mông-Lan hasn't stopped with expressing herself in words. She is also an accomplished visual artist, working in paint and photography. Her largest work to date—"Person with Calloused Feet & Hands that Remember"—comprises four panels splashed with bright reds and blues behind subtle geometric red lines, and measures 94" x 205".

But Mông-Lan is modest about her prolific creative output. "I don't think in terms of 'greatest achievement,'" she says. "After I've done something I find myself kind of forgetting that I had accomplished whatever it was. A certain amnesia takes over and I keep on existing.

"I really think that whatever I do," Mông-Lan says, "it is the process that matters most, and the process is more important than the finished product. It is always healthier to think of making [anything]. . . as a way of being rather than thinking too much of the final product. I think this way of thinking stems from my Buddhist background. It is like breathing. Does one ever think which breath is the best breath? We continue to breathe and that is it."

As an artist and as a person, Mông-Lan keeps herself firmly planted in the present. "I try to stay in the present, think in the present, think about now, and not let the future take over my enjoyment of the present," she said.

And at the present, Mông-Lan has thrown herself into enjoying her teaching. Already this year she has coached her students in writing poems, short stories, and plays.

"They are all creative individuals, some very much so," Mông-Lan says of her students. "In some, I see a hunger for literature and writing. Some are just beginning to wake up from their hibernation away from writing and literature, and are trying to make sense of it all. All of them seem to be seriously grappling with the genres and with . . . their own writing."

Mông-Lan called the atmosphere at UMUC–Asia "special."

"We teach on an Air Force base and so we have the heightened awareness of being a visitor, a guest, . . ." Mông-Lan said. "Not only this, but we are on Japanese soil and that doubles the feeling of being a visitor. This 'doubleness' provides a uniqueness to the UMUC teaching experience that I'd never experienced before."

In fact, Mông-Lan has enjoyed teaching so much that she plans to return to Tokyo and UMUC–Asia after her year-long stint in Vietnam. Funded by her Fulbright grant next year, Mông-Lan will be able to work on another book of poems and anything else that inspires her in Vietnam, whether visual or prose-based. She is excited about the opportunity to learn more about Vietnamese literature and art.

"I have an essential interest in Southeast Asia where I was born," Mông-Lan says, "and continue to be interested in Asia's cultures, its languages, and its literature."

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, she is completely immersed in learning Japanese. "This takes an all-out effort!" she says. But she doesn't let it keep her inside. She tries to exercise and dance every day, and she particularly enjoys Argentine tango and salsa. The message to keep healthy has been drilled into her from a young age—both of Mông-Lan's parents are medical doctors and all four of her siblings decided to follow the same career path.

"If one doesn't have one's health, what does one have?" Mông-Lan asks.

A graduate of University of the State of New York, Regents College (now Excelsior College), where she studied English literature and psychology, Mông-Lan earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and spent two years at Stanford University on a post-graduate creative writing fellowship.

To see Mông-Lan's artwork or read her poetry, visit her homepage at www.monglan.com.