He's a writer who draws deeply from personal experience to explore the wider story of working-class life in America.

In his latest novel just released, Ushin Vuong blends grief, healing, and resilience into a powerful and poetic narrative.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown sits down with him for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

There's just something connected to the brain with the way the hand moved. sits down with him for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

There's just something connected to the brain with the way the hand moves.

He writes by hand.

When you're writing by hand, every sentence takes about 10, 15 seconds longer.

Types drafts on a vintage typewriter.

In an age of instant output, poet and novelist Ocean Vaughn takes the long way in. His latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a meditation on pain, unexpected acts of kindness,

and a reckoning with the history that shaped him personally.

I've always been fixated on kindness without power.

You know, there's so many people in America

who don't have the means to alter each other's lives.

The communities that I grew up with,

working class, poor folks,

who don't have, you know, money or positions

or means to rescue each other.

And yet I've watched people still commit themselves

to kindness, even though they know it won't change anything.

An immigrant from Vietnam, Vuong now 36, spent most of his childhood in a working-class

community in Hartford, Connecticut, much like the one where he set his novel.

A fictional New England town called Gladness, where his young protagonist, like Vuong himself,

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