Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Daniel Lee. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Daniel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on so far in my creative life was the manuscript for my first book, Anatomy of Want. The basis of it was my MFA creative thesis, but I had already been writing poems for it since undergraduate school. By the time the manuscript had been accepted for publication in 2018, I had been working on poems for it since 1997-1998; thus it took about 20 years for the manuscript to come together. Anatomy of Want is in many ways the distillation of that pivotal span of life–from 19-20 years old to 40 years old–spent mostly in New York City that forged the enduring elements of my identity.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a third generation refugee, who came to the United States as a newborn as a result of the expulsion of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, the country where my parents were born because their parents had fled China from Japanese occupation. Growing up and well into my thirties, I did not realize how the refugee experiences on both sides of my family had shaped the silence that keeps the details of the family histories so elusive. And it is perhaps a generational trauma that has reproduced itself in a form of a disconnect between myself, my siblings, and our parents. I don’t want to misrepresent our relationship to them as estranged, but there are numerous blind spots, swathes of memory that stay in the dark, that do cast much of my parents and my grandparents’ lives as strangers. Nevertheless, I had been raised just outside Chicago with a substantial amount of laissez-faire parenting due to economic necessity. This was really fundamental to my ability to indulge in my creativity. Coloring books, make-shift forts, the whole of my imagination were my babysitters. This allowance for creative exploration at an early age became a life-long practice. The first poems I remember writing that were not classroom assignments and that I shared were penned in the fifth grade and poetry never left me from then on, though my first creative aspiration was to become a famous art photographer. Also, an early realization and recognition of my queerness also informed my writing and the art I wanted to create. And to this day, I see my identities as connection points to others, which allow an empathy—if not a sense of familiarity—to my work. I want to reach queer, Cantonese, refugee audiences. I want to reach them in the languages they read and speak. I want these audiences to know that not only do queer, Cantonese (American), refugee poets/writers and artists exist, but even from this particular overlap of identities can one find something relatable, touching, and maybe profound. And I’m not shy about letting people know about my work. I don’t suffer from imposter syndrome. I own a fundamental belief that my work should be read by audiences anywhere.
That confidence exists, in part, because of the excellence of my teachers–and not just the brilliant individuals who actually instructed me–but also the writers I’ve read, the performers and speakers I’ve heard, the journalists and filmmakers who documented lives, history, and places that inspired me. Those teachers helped solidify a fundamental aim of my work: to invoke feeling. I’m not interested in letting a reader have no interior response to my poetry. I want to use our relationship to words, to language, to invoke and provoke. That is my goal.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
To me, the best way to support artists, creatives, and build a thriving creative ecosystem is to materially invest in their livelihoods. Our society mistakenly believes that just supporting an artist’s creative output is sufficient. That is a delusion based in a capitalistic notion of a value exchange. What would truly build a sustainable creative culture is making sure artists, writers, and musicians have quality healthcare, food security, livable wages (in the likelihood that a significant–if not the majority–of their income does not come from their creative endeavors), and time to create. Help artist thrive as people so that they can thrive as artists.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being a poet is creating an experience or connection with an audience member and them being so moved that they overcome any sense of embarrassment to come and tell me what they thought or felt about my work. Not too long ago, I was reading outdoors in Bryant Park in New York City. Several passersby of South Asian descent had planted themselves in the front row of chairs while I was reading. At some point, I read a piece titled “For Identification Purposes Only,” a poem about a garment factor tragedy in Bangladesh. After the reading, these individuals came to me, asking if that poem had been published anywhere as they had been moved by it. They wanted their own copy of it. That is best thing about sharing my poetry to the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.danielwklee.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strongplum/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danielwkl
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwahkeunglee/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielsaudade
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@danielwklee
- Other: TikTok: @danielwklee
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