Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt here with Octavia Bright. Hi, Octavia. Hi, Carrie.

We have a very special show for you today. We do indeed. Instead of the usual program, you are going to hear Octavia's interview with

the writer Ocean Vuong. I was sadly away when Ocean was over, but we decided he's such an

exciting author that Octavia would go solo. So, Octavia, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit

about Ocean? Sure, Carrie. Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet,, essayist and author. His critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, among others. His writings been featured in the Atlantic, Harper's, the New Yorker, the village voice, to name Butterfew. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an assistant professor at the MFA program for poets and writers at UMass Amherst. On Earth, we're briefly gorgeous, is his first novel. So here's Octavia's interview with Ocean. Also, as we mentioned on the minisode, this is our last show before our summer break. We will be back in September.

Ocean Fong, thank you for joining me here on Literary Friction. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure

to be here. We've asked you to start with a reading, so could you set that up for us, please?

Yeah, essentially, it's a sex scene between these two boys, the protagonist Little Dog, who's the speaker,

and a 15-year-old white boy he meets while working on a tobacco farm outside of Hartford, Connecticut.

He's two years older than Little Dog.

Trevor and his daddy lived alone in an Easter yellow mobile home behind the interstate.

That afternoon, his old man was outlaying red brick walkways for a commercial park out in

Chesterfield. The white door frames in the mobile home were stained pink with fingerprints,

a house colored with work, which meant a house colored with exhaustion, just repair. The rug uprooted, so no one got it clean. But the hardwood never waxed and polished, and you could feel the hammered down nails through your socks. The cabinet doors were torn off to make it easy.

There was a cinder block under the sink to hold the pipes. In the living room, above the couch,

was a duct tape poster of Neil Young, guitar in hand, grimacing into a song I've never heard.

In his room, Trevor turned on a Sony stereo, hooked to two speakers, set on a dresser,

and bobbed his head as a hip-hop beat intensified through the amp.

The beats were interspersed with recordings of gunshots, men shouting, a car peeling off.

Have you heard this yet?

It's this new dude, 50 cent, Trevor smiled. Pretty dope,

huh? A bird flew past the window, making the room seem to blink. I've never heard of him,

...