A Visceral and All-Encompassing Experience: Interview with Ellen Chang-Richardson
Ellen Chang-Richardson is a poet, editor and community organizer of Taiwanese and Cambodian-Chinese descent. She is the author of three chapbooks, Unlucky Fours (Anstruther Press), snap, pop, performance (Gap Riot Press) and Assimilation Tactics (Coven Editions). Her most recent work can be found in Watch Your Head, untethered magazine, andThe Fiddlehead. The founder of Little Birds Poetry, Ellen is also the co-founder/co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series, a reader for Bywords.ca, long con magazine and Room, and a member of the poetry collective VII.
Ellen Chang-Richardson was the former Assistant Curator and Events Manager at Barbara Edwards Contemporary in Toronto. Now based in Ottawa, she is working on a project that highlights female and BIPOC contemporary artists whose work has informed the trajectory of contemporary art history.
In this interview, Manahil talks to Ellen about her new chapbook, snap, pop, performance, out with Gap Riot Press, as well as the joys of collaborative work. This interview was conducted over Zoom on January 2nd, 2021 and has been edited for clarity.
To learn more about Ellen, see her work on her website, follow her on Twitter @ehjchang, and on Instagram @ehjchang.
Manahil: Congratulations on your new chapbook, snap, pop, performance, out with Gap Riot Press! The cover is so shiny.
It was exciting to see this particular chapbook because some of the poems like “the middle ground” were some of the first poems of yours I read in workshops with Little Birds Poetry. It’s lovely to see the project you’re most engaged with in book form.
What was it like putting the chapbook together?
Ellen: Thank you, Manahil! I see snap, pop, performance as a teaser into my larger collection of ekphrastic poems. It’s an ongoing project that started just after we met in 2019. The pandemic put a small stop to the project because my main point of reference material, the National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives, is now closed.
Dani and Kate at Gap Riot were so excited about this collection and that made me more excited about the poems themselves. It took me a while to figure out the direction I wanted to take for this particular chapbook though. In my mind, each chapbook is a world of its own. The larger collection of poems focuses on photography, film, multidisciplinary art, installation, and performance. How do I distill that into twenty-five pages?
Manahil: The chapbook also includes illustrations by Isa He.
Ellen: Isa and I went to school together in Shanghai. We met when we were nine years old! One of my earliest “rebel” memories is with her. After the chapbook came out, my mom called me up and said, “I have a memory of you and Isa. You two were twelve, and Isa got on the phone and pretended to be her mother to make excuses for you being out so late.” I remember the night…we had met a couple of cute boys, decided it’d be grand to hop on the back of their motorcycles and drive around Shanghai. When we graduated high school, Isa went to school in the U.S. and I came to Canada. This past summer, she posted an image on her Instagram – very similar to the one that’s on the front cover of the chapbook. It was a great illustration, and I knew immediately that her work would go beautifully with my work.
I reached out and told her about the chapbook. At that point, about two-thirds of the chapbook was complete and I had finally figured out the focus for it: installation and performance. She was super interested, so I sent her the manuscript. She ended up creating drawings specific to the poems she read.
Manahil: Did you know you wanted illustrations to go with the poems in the chapbook when you reached out to Isa?
Ellen: I did. You have illustrations throughout your own chapbooks, and that’s been an inspiration for me. See, if you insert illustrations that work alongside the poetry, a chapbook suddenly becomes a cross-genre piece.
Manahil: I like how the illustrations are not literal representations of the poems. You’ve interpreted the base artworks and Isa then does that with your poems. That link is wonderful. It’s something I learned when I did illustrations for my first chapbook, Pipe Rose, which were more literal interpretations of the poems. From there, I started thinking about the new dimensions artwork brings to poems.
Ellen: Yes, that part is super cool. Isa took two months to come up with illustrations because she went into the poems and followed the citations to the artworks and artists I referenced. There’s a threefold citation! I hope readers can experience that thread of learning themselves when they read our work.
Manahil: I love the notes you include at the end about each artwork. All the poems are ekphrastic. There’s so much value to how you bring your own encounters with the world to your experience of these works.
We both read for long con magazine. I appreciate how, to submit to the magazine, poets have to give artist statements. The artist statements appear in your chapbook at the end.
To use the example of “the middle ground”: you also draw influence from Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s Port of Being in addition to inspiration from Caroline Monnet’s work.
Ellen: Monnet’s Transatlantic (2018) and Proximal I, II, III, IV (2018) were on view at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) for Àbadakone at the time I was doing heavy research for the larger collection. Prior to the start of the exhibition, I had seen a brief overview of Monnet’s work (published by the NGC to build up to the exhibition) and after seeing one photograph of her installation, I knew I had to go experience it in person. It was a visceral and all-encompassing experience – orbs on the floor with a video of the sea in a dark, dark room. My luck though, the video was broken the first time I went to go see it. I ended up going through the rest of the exhibition and returning to it a few days later.
I sat there for hours. At the time, I was researching Ken Lum’s body of work for my poem, “urban facts,” published in Cypress: A Literary Journal in 2020. Each day I finished researching for “urban facts,” I would go to see Monnet’s work. I was reading port of being at that time as well. port of being was the first time I had seen a faded-out last stanza to illustrate a thought within a thought. I greatly admire Shazia’s work and was excited about experimenting with her style of writing in my own poetry.
Manahil: You work on each of these poems side-by-side in your research, so they’re speaking to each other in addition to speaking to the artwork.
Ellen: You know, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way before but yes! It’s what happens in the literary world and the art world too – writers/artists create alongside each other and in doing so respond to one another, even if not consciously. Each poem takes anywhere between twelve to sixteen hours of research. Traditionally, ekphrasis responds to one specific artwork, but I want to push this definition to include an artist’s entire body of work. Through research, a lot of conversation happens between my mind, my body, the photographs of the art, and the lines that stand out to me from the exhibition essays I read.
Manahil: Having read a number of pieces around this project, I noticed the form of each poem is very different. How does the artwork inform how you visualize the poem’s spatial use? How do you decide what form best suits a particular poem?
“One Whose Name Was Water” uses white space on the page. Each word has an importance.
Ellen: The artwork sometimes does have a say in how I decide to write about it. That poem first appeared in long con magazine as an actual erasure, which speaks to the work of Danh Võ, the artist I am writing about. I condensed it for this chapbook. I love Danh Võ’s work. He is an incredible artist, making intellectual, conceptual works about identity and its mutability, as well as the mutability of institutional relationships, like marriage. I first saw his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A lot of it is playing with documentation. He sources actual historical artifacts and recontextualizes them. He looks at how white male voices and white cultural power has dominated how we define ourselves. I stumbled across an exhibition catalogue about his show at the Walker Art Museum in 2013. The long-form essay, written by white male curator Bartholomew Ryan, was brilliant and discussed the main points of his work. I started erasing the essay to highlight the specific points, and to create a conversation about what I thought were the most important parts to understanding both the essay and Võ’s art. Back to the spacing – I work a lot with spatial poetry. When I re-worked the poem for this chapbook, I wanted to focus back in on the empty blank space. To me, that empty white space is our history.
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Manahil: This poem in particular calls back to your first chapbook, Unlucky Fours. You use blank space to create tension.
You mentioned that researching and working on this project has been difficult because of COVID-19. You’re not just looking at a piece of art – you’re immersing yourself in a gallery space where a curator has set up the space and the architecture of a gallery itself informs how a piece can come to life.
How have you been able to adapt or find new avenues of art to work with?
Ellen: Before the pandemic, I would often visit the National Gallery of Canada and the Ottawa Art Gallery. I went back to Toronto often and would visit the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, as well as smaller commercial galleries. The focus for the larger collection is female and BIPOC artists who have affected contemporary art history. All these visits have influenced which artists I choose to highlight.
At the start of this project, I wanted to highlight every artist I possibly could, but I quickly realized that was impossible. Hopefully, readers interested in this work will look up the artists I write about and from there find more artists that they then connect with themselves. All the artists I choose speak to me, as the artists others choose to explore should speak to them. As for visiting a gallery space to experience these works, I think that also plays a key part. Different museums will have different curators who contextualize work in different ways. It is the way that they contextualize work that affects how we end up seeing and understanding the work, which also informs the trajectory of art history and what we read via textbooks years down the line.
The pandemic. I’m lucky to have a partner who is an academic and able to grant me access to academic articles about art. There have been a few exhibitions that have taken place online though. I’m in the middle of exploring one: “MAJESTY: Illusion between Italy and Canada,” presented by the Italian Institute of Culture in Toronto. It is part of a larger project called Italy Under Construction. My cousin Deborah Wang, Artistic Director of DesignTO, shared the exhibition with me. Although it’s not the same as exploring an exhibition in person, it’s a fascinating way to curate.
Another example of different ways I have been engaging with artwork during this time is in the research for my poem about American contemporary artist Kara Walker. I have been sourcing JSTOR articles, sure, but I have also been on her website a lot. Her website is beautifully interactive. Putting more emphasis on an artist’s website has enabled me to experience their work through a form they control. That’s an interesting twist.
Manahil: Have outdoor artworks like murals or outdoor installations worked into your project?
Ellen: A number of the artists I am working on aren’t based in Canada. Some of these artists have created installations outdoors, absolutely. Before the pandemic, I travelled a lot because of my work with the gallery but…I’m not able to go anywhere anymore. None of us are! Kara Walker’s installation, The Katastwóf Karavan, premiered at Algiers Point, New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi River. It is the exact location where, historically, a lot of slave ships landed in the U.S. I would have loved to see that installation in person.
Manahil: As you said earlier, snap, pop, performance is a teaser to a larger collection. You’re not able to research for your collection right now. Where do you see your work going?
Ellen: Although I haven’t been able to work on new poems, this pause has allowed me to narrow down my focus and vision for the collection. I’m polishing that aspect of the manuscript, which is equally – if not more – important than the poems themselves. The pause has created space for deep thinking – including a title!
I re-subscribed to Border Crossings, a Canadian art magazine based in Winnipeg. Border Crossings is a leading visual art magazine, but it recently featured an interview with Dionne Brand and select poetry by Chimwemwe Undi! My best friend, Neda Omidvar, is the Director of Barbara Edwards Contemporary – she sends me ArtForum issues every few months. So, even though I’m not generating work right now, I am reading about art and experiencing art through these different vessels.
Manahil: Would you see illustrations being a part of your vision for your full-length collection?
Ellen: My dream would be to have a work by each of the artists I’m working with in the collection, but I don’t know how I would make that happen. I’ll revisit that dream when I’ve done most of the writing. One exciting note – Ken Lum knows I’m writing this collection, so maybe he would donate a photograph of an artwork? Ken, if you’re reading this…
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Manahil: You obviously enjoy collaborative work and having conversations with artists. You and I are in a collaborative writing group, VII.
Ellen: VII has been a lifesaver during the pandemic.
Manahil: How does the writing we do as a group inform your own work? I’ve found that writing collaboratively reframed my approach to my own writing. I’m curious about your interactions with our collaborative work in tandem with your solo writing.
Ellen: I love that question because I think collaboration and community is incredibly important. Collaboration should be a new pillar for creativity.
I used to think you could go about life on your own but having a community to support and who supports you is wonderful. One thing I love about collaborating with VII is that I so admire each of your individual works. Coming together to collaborate has pushed how I write with regards to form. Because of my training as a visual artist, I use white space in my poetic works. nina jane drystek’s visual experimentation in her poetry has pushed me to think about space in a new way. Chris Johnson’s use of repetition and colloquial language has worked its way into my work. The tenderness of your work has made me pause in my daily life to notice and pluck out the moments of tenderness that exist. The structure and prose elements of Margo LaPierre, Conyer Clayton and Helen Robertson’s works. Before VII, I never wrote prose poetry. Now I try to write one prose-ish poem every few weeks. It’s great practice.
Manahil: “Because I Am a Boy” plays with the prose poetry form. I was surprised, in a good way, to see that was the first poem. The poem was quite different from your other works. Did the poem come about when we started collaborating?
Ellen: The first draft of “Because I Am a Boy” came about before we began collaborating, but the editing process happened throughout. For me, the editing process is far more intensive than writing. My writing process is quick, and then I spend months editing a poem. Editing the second stanza has definitely been informed by my exposure to prose poetry through VII. The last stanza too is inspired by the last stanza of David Ly’s “Post Two,” from his debut collection Mythical Man.
Manahil: It’s funny because I also didn’t write prose poetry until after we started collaborating.
Ellen: I’m very excited about the series of prose poems VII is currently working on. Before our collaborations, I never thought about the technical skill involved in prose poetry, such as long sentences, short sentences, definitions and dialogue. For someone who isn’t currently pursuing a Masters or a PhD in literature/poetry, collaborating with VII is a daily practice in writing.
Manahil: Because I’m surrounded by poetry and poets, I write more. Writing with VII early in the pandemic, I knew that all I had to do was write two lines. That took some of the pressure off writing and brought back enjoyment to the practice. In trying to publish work, the joy of writing and exploring can slip away. Our group has a fun dynamic, and we bring that joy into the writing itself.
That wasn’t a question.
Ellen: That was a statement I agree with!
Manahil: I loved hearing about your approach to ekphrasis and how it’s so immersive. You don’t just think about the aesthetics of a piece but also the context surrounding the work.
Ellen: I credit that to my decade of work and formal training in the art world. My first dream was to be a curator at a big museum – and then I realized I needed a PhD for that. It’s interesting how life works.
Thank you so much for asking me these questions. You’re the first one to do so, and it’s exciting to be able to talk about my work from this particular perspective.