Grace Hsu is a senior, and in her first year of Calvin's Master of Speech Pathology and Audiology. She writes poetry and prose, and has been often featured in Dialogue, most recently in vol. 56.2 with "Freefall", "If Sherlock looked this way, what might he deduce?", and in vol. 57.1 with "Big Blue", "Easter Weekend Aria", "the colosseum to the weed", and "Sestina Firenze". Grace recently spoke to Dialogue about her process, how her writing has changed at Calvin, and how a sense of home often fuels her work.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Dialogue: When did Dialogue first pop up on your radar? When did you think it might be a good idea to submit?

 

Grace: Dialogue was on my radar when I was considering Calvin in late high school, and I knew I had an interest in writing so I was looking at things like Chimes and also at Dialogue and I even remember writing on my college application saying maybe I'll get involved in something like Dialogue because I know I enjoyed writing and that ended up happening in freshman year. I saw copies of Dialogue lying around and was reminded that it existed and I was like, oh, wait, I have always kind of wanted to. Like, I've always been writing and I kind of want to pursue publication for my work. So, I submitted for a few semesters and eventually got in.

 

D: Tell me about your writing before Calvin. What did that look like?

 

G: I’ve always loved reading. I learned to read ridiculously early and was always immersed in those storybook worlds and loved reading those kinds of books. This is kind of a roundabout story, but at my American International School in Taiwan, every year we had to take a standardized writing assessment and for third grade I remember writing a story about a golden scooter that could fly. I got 100% on it and I thought, ‘Wow, I'm good at this.’ It was initially that sense of accomplishment for me that kept me going back even in upper elementary, but it quickly became something that I really, really loved.

 

D: Have you always found it easy to write? Was it easier to write then? Harder to write now?

 

G: It was a lot easier to write then because the less that I knew about craft, the more I didn't care about when I put out.

 

D: How do you balance that trade off in your head? Would you rather write without the pre-occupation of staying within the constraints of craft?

 

G: I always find that, find what I come up with is worth it because I think the writing process at its best is cathartic and revealing even if what I put out is something I know only I'm going to see, I consider it worth it for having gone through that process. I think that after having taken classes now and grown so much in my craft, I think I'm more likely to find issue with whatever I do put out because I hold it to a higher standard now and so I'm less likely to share it and put it out.

 

D: Your work in Dialogue seems to run in a few themes that are really important to you, like self-discovery, your faith, and places for which you feel a strong sense of nostalgia. Would you agree with that?

 

G: I would agree. A lot of what I’ve written is focused on the past, and where I grew up in Taiwan. A lot of my writing in college has focused around like cultural identity, thinking about memories in the past but also who I am now. I'm a third culture kid, which means that I grew up in a host country different from my parents' culture. So, you kind of grow up as a mix between two cultures. My parents are originally from Taiwan, but I was raised pretty American. I consider Taiwan home, but I'm more fluent in English. So, I think a lot of my writing has been an attempt to reconcile those two graces or those two identities, and asking a lot of questions about where I  fall in between the Asian and American continuum as an Asian-American? The first piece I got published in Dialogue was called “All Golden”, and it was about the day I left Taiwan. And so, that's kind of very representative of that sort of inner wrestling and trying to remember and hold on to the past.

 

D: Do you see your writing as a way to maintain, or like renew this third-culture identity?

 

G: I think I just happen to write a lot about things that resonate with me, and so, I’m jumping between different cultures, and feeling the impacts of that, and using writing as a processing tool, and then I just submit to Dialogue whatever I happen to have, right? It’s not super intentional. Maybe the closest example of what you’re asking about is like “Big Blue”, which was published in 57.1. That was, last semester, my first semester of graduate school in speech pathology, and I just kind of sat down and was like, ‘I want to write a story.’ I was thinking that Dialogue doesn't receive a lot of fiction, but also just because I miss writing stories. So I just went back into my journal and found a moment where I had seen this brother and sister on a motorcycle in Taiwan and I just ran with it. I think that's the closest time where I was like I'm going to write this specific piece to publish, but even then it was more like, I want to, like, explore this for myself.

 

D: Have you been back to Taiwan in the last couple of years?

 

G: I have not. No. I have not in the last, like, almost two years. I went back to Taiwan between sophomore and junior year for five weeks, and I haven't been back since.

 

D: After writing so much about this place that you love and is so important to you, what is it like to go back and see it with older eyes? What has that done for your writing?

 

G: Gosh, that's a good question. I honestly don't know. It was really intense. I was trying to, like, soak up every sentence, like, every second. I was writing a lot, trying to capture all of it. I think because of Taiwan's political situation, every time I go back, there's a sense that, like, I don't know what's going to happen in the next two years and when I'm going to be able to come back again. And so just trying to really soak it up, like, what it feels like to be home. A lot of my old journals lived there, and I remember sorting through those, and, yeah like reconciling myself now with who I was then.

 

D: Did you enjoy writing when you were younger, without a kind of pressure or standard, or do you enjoy what you're doing right now?

 

G: I think I've enjoyed my college level writing more. In middle school I had all these, like, novel length ideas that I was trying to put on paper, and I would always write, like, two or three chapters, and be like, no, I can't do this, and then loop back.

 

D: The epic, tragic aims of a middle schooler.

 

G: Yes. You’re always setting you up for failure. I've kind of encouraged myself to focus more on the short story and shorter forms. I've described poetry to myself as like pocket sized art, something that I can do on my phone in like 10 minutes in an airport. Dialogue has given me a chance to just write, and some things I submit are not quite up to my standards, and I think are honestly kind of embarrassing and I don’t think are good. But then, it gets in and people read it, and I see it differently afterwards, and realize it was good enough to be published. It’s fulfilling, seeing these pieces come out of my thought process, and eventually see other people thinking about them too.

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D: Just to kind of give credit where credit’s due, you’ve always been kind of an exemplary ‘Dialogue citizen’, if you will. We always get a constant stream of pieces from you, you’re always helping out with jurying, even when you know your pieces will be discussed. And then I find out that you’re not even an English major. I know lots of English writing majors that we don’t see a single piece from, and it’s kind of confounding to me. What makes you so prolific? What does that kind of vulnerability mean for you, to listen to feedback on your own pieces semester after semester?

 

G: Well, thank you. I think jurying has been something where I can set aside, like, two hours one night in the semester to go and do something I really love while I'm in a major that's like STEM-based and pretty different from that artistic side of me. It’s always a joy to show up and just kind of participate in that space with other people who enjoy that creative process too. About the English major thing, this is a phenomenon I've noticed too. I asked one of my English major friends last semester about something she submitted, and she also mentioned that it was the only one that was up to her standards. She only submitted one piece. I know her and I believe that anything she wanted to submit has a really, really good chance. I think it might be someone’s standards, or it could be that when you’re majoring in English, and you want your creative writing to go somewhere there’s really high stakes. For me, if I don’t submit, I won’t get in, so I submit as much as I can.

 

D: Do you have any advice to somebody who might be nervous to submit? Why should folks submit their work to Dialogue?

 

G: My philosophy has always been that you can’t get published if you don’t give yourself a shot at being published. I began college with a goal of being published as much as I could and that's a goal that I’ve met, to my surprise. So first thing is to give yourself the shot. Also, come jury. Talk about what pieces you love with other people. If you’re really dreaming about getting published, it’ll help you learn the craft, and learn a little bit about what Dialogue is looking for. There is definitely a genre that just works for Dialogue, and jurying helps you kind of figure out what that is. But don’t let someone else’s success define your own creative process or what you write or choose to submit. Keep creating, keep submitting, just enjoy what you do.

 

D: Thanks a lot for doing this Grace!

 

G: Yeah, thank you guys.

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