We follow Naomi Shihap Nye with another writer, Ocean Vong.

He is, like her, a teacher with words and about words.

And they both illustrate an idea that I love

of the ancient rabbis, that I experienced to be true,

that words make worlds, or to make that more active,

we create worlds with our words. We also have a power to destroy with our words.

We can make someone's day or break someone's day with our words. They are muscles of such force. And if hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have

to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being.

Ocean Vong is such a fascinating and singular person. He has become extraordinarily important in American letters as a poet, as a novelist, as an essayist, and he did not learn to read until after he was 11. There is a great

deal of dyslexia in his family, and his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam and

survived war and refugee camps to get here. And I notice that often when people describe oceans writing,

they describe it as an opus that chronicles the survival of violence. And that is true. But I'd also

say that the sweep of his work

is about bearing witness to the other side of violence

and the possibility of joy

while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness

to the fullness of what was carried and what has been survived.

And that, I would say, is the quality and content of the hope that I think ocean carries

embodies.

It's interesting, I asked him about the spirituality of his childhood.

And he talked about how spirituality in his home began with care rooted in physical bodies.

And he mentioned that in temples and even in many Asian American households, certainly in his,

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