2020-12-21
48 分钟Topics covered include: the purity of poetry, radical okay-ness, the alternate version of Ocean’s life as a straight man, why love wasn't a question in Memorial, the power of saying no, learning to choose yourself, the exoticism of suburbia, the upside of being small, letting another artist expand upon your vision through adaptation, and why being a writer is less a career than a miracle.
Hey, and welcome Back to the 824 podcast.
If you're a reader of contemporary fiction, you're no doubt familiar with the names Brian Washington and Ocean Vuong.
Brian just published his debut novel, Memorial, this fall, and Ocean made his own debut last year with On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous.
We're thrilled to be adapting Memorial as a limited TV series, and now seems like as good a time as any to announce that.
We're also busy working on the film adaptation of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
Both novels are essential when you're reading, and this conversation between Brian and Ocean is a perfect primer.
My name is Ocean Wong.
I'm a writer and poet.
My name's Brian Washington.
I'm the author of Memorial and Lot, and I get to talk with Ocean for the A24 podcast.
How are you doing?
Despite.
I feel like that's despite the world.
Despite everything, how was it like releasing a book in a pandemic?
I think I feel like this is something that's like an anthropological interest for any writer and in the literary culture as a whole.
Perhaps decades from now, perhaps forever, we'll look at this collection of writers who, doing perhaps the most vulnerable thing a writer can do, which is to step out into the world and for you, a debut novel, something that is no small feat in itself, into a pandemic where the rules changed.
You know, obviously it wasn't what you expected, but how has it been so far?
I think on my end, I have no cause to complain, and that is solely due to the proficiency of the folks that I work with.
For me, it was mostly just a matter of, like, executing the plans that we came up with or either the plans that they came up with.
So I was really fortunate to get to work with a team that was deeply amenable to our current crises, as ever, but also a state of perpetual change.