Journeying into Writerly Aesthetic, featuring K-Ming Chang
Feb 19, 2024
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Guest K-Ming Chang discusses disorientation as a style, language living in the body, and hating plot. The interview focuses on writerly aesthetic, language, and the existential position on writing. Chang's meditation on language is expansive and invites us to consider our own stories.
Following language and imagery shapes the story, emphasizing sensory pleasure and oral storytelling influence.
Embracing disorientation in writing leads to a more expansive reading experience, challenging traditional expectations.
Deep dives
Following language as a way to find your story
Kim Ming-Chang emphasizes the importance of following language and imagery as a way to discover and shape your story. Inspired by the oral storytelling tradition, Kim Ming-Chang believes that language holds a sensory pleasure that guides her writing process. By allowing the language to lead, she finds that sentences become animated and bring her to surprising places in the narrative. She aims to blend the rigidity of the written form with the uncertainty and playfulness of oral storytelling, resulting in a maximalist and sensory approach to writing.
The interplay between aesthetics and storytelling
Grant Faulkner and Kim Ming-Chang explore the concept of aesthetics and its connection to storytelling. They discuss how aesthetics shape a writer's lens on the world, helping them express and understand life. Kim Ming-Chang draws from her heritage of oral storytelling to craft narratives that embrace the strange and absurd. She believes that an aesthetic is not separate from a writer's reality but influences how they capture the ambiguity and disconnections of life. The interplay between aesthetics, narrative, and personal expression serves as an entry point into relationships with people, objects, events, and even political structures.
Embracing the disorienting and fragmented narrative
Kim Ming-Chang embraces disorienting the reader in her works, challenging traditional expectations of anchoring and grounding. She believes that disorientation can be a way to create a more expansive and surprising reading experience. By combining elements of maximalism, clutteredness, and polyphonic voices, she aims to capture the uncertainty and ambiguity of life. Kim Ming-Chang finds inspiration in oral storytelling and the storytelling traditions of her heritage, using their influence to shape her aesthetic and approach to writing.
The relationship between plot and storytelling
Kim Ming-Chang expresses her aversion to plot and her preference for a more sensory and exploratory approach to storytelling. She describes her contentious relationship with plot and her disdain for its focus on determining the beauty or significance of an object. Instead, she values the sensory pleasure of language and the multi-layered meanings that arise from following the language's lead. Kim Ming-Chang sees plot as separate from story and focuses on crafting narratives that embrace uncertainty, ambiguity, and small micro-moments.
A fun episode about aesthetic, language, and paying attention to style and taste in writing. This week’s guest K-Ming Chang talks about disorientation as a style, language as something that lives in the body, and hating plot. This is a playful interview that focuses on the experiential and reminds us that we all have an existential position on our own writing. Chang’s meditation on language is expansive and inviting, and invites us to consider all the ways we are the stories we’re told.
