Podcast Interview on The Archive Project @ Pickathon 2022: Dao Strom & Jon Raymond, with Anis MOJGANI
Jon Raymond and Dao Strom discuss multidisciplinary writing and artistry with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at Pickathon music festival. In this episode of The Archive Project, Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and artists Dao Strom, author most recently of the music and poetry project Traveler’s Ode/Instrument; and Jon Raymond, author of the recent novel Denial and screenwriter of First Cow and many more projects.
The trio talks about what their processes are like as artists with multiple and often hybrid modes of creativity, how they started as artists and how their genres have changed over the years as they move between music, visual art, filmmaking, fiction, poetry, written versus spoken literary work, and more.
Poet Q&A: Dao Strom, winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, Oregon ArtsWatch, May 2022
“…My experience as a Vietnamese American, as a Vietnamese refugee, as a Viet woman, is not definitive of Vietnamese people (although I think that would be the default “understanding” some might take), and the Vietnamese aspects of my experience also don’t completely define me. I guess by stating a focus on “textures” and “vulnerability” and “ambiguity” in my artist statement, I’m also trying to hold space for not-defining — which is also a restless, impermanent, impossible-to-sustain kind of space.”
DAO STROM INTERVIEWED BY WOOGEE BAE, FULL STOP MAGAZINE, FEB 2022
“I think that language, for many people of diaspora, is certainly and can be a source of both loss and regeneration. We are severed and fragmented by it, yes, but this also produces a necessity in us to be inventive and very perceptive with language…”
“ON EXCAVATION AND ACTIVATING GHOSTS IN THE FIELD": A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JULIAN SAPORITI AND DAO STROM, DIACRITICS, JUL 2021.
“…for me, experimentation with form and content becomes something else—maybe: a way of speaking from the inside, using my own lexicon, and not catering to a gaze from outside but also leaving space open for interpretation… I consider aesthetics a different way of being political.”
“DAO STROM AND BRIAN HARNETTY :: IN CONVERSATION.” MUSIC CONVERSATION, AQUARIUM DRUNKARD, JUN 2021.
“In making these multimodal hybrid projects, I think I always had in mind they would or should have multiple entry points, or should allow for that possibility at least, and that maybe this is something integral to the hybrid ethos–that structure is fluid. And that experience of the work can be, too. It can be fragmented, it can be nonlinear, it can be just poetry or just music, or it can be a multidimensional kind of “reading”…”
“MY OWN PATH OF HYBRIDITY”: INTERVIEW IN NAT. BRUT, FALL 2020
“At the time I wrote the stories in Gentle Order, my impetus was simply to write a book that could be read and responded to on the merit of its own art and questing, and I wanted to create characters who could be accepted as individuals, without needing the (overt) filter of race applied in order to guide how to read them. I wanted to write the kind of stories I loved to read: ones that evoked in me inklings of deeper insight and resonances concerning the nuances and mysteries—emotional, ineffable, etc.—about life as a human being, as a human body amid other bodies, with complexities and disparities and ambiguities all intact. And this book that I wrote was rejected by its first publisher for the reasons cited, “interiority” being one of those, which means they did not see writing of such “interiority” to be sellable or interesting enough and from which also follows that they did not see “interiority” in young Vietnamese American women—who are not obviously wrestling with their issues of race—as being important or of interest enough.” Dao Strom interviewed by Meghan Lamb.
“MORE THAN SURVIVAL”: INTERVIEW IN ABOUT PLACE JOURNAL, MAY 2020
“I had begun to contemplate how memory is (metaphorically) an echo of an event that no longer exists concretely in the world, just as delay and echo are literally reverberations—repeats—of a sound source that has already been uttered, that is finished. For me, this is such an apt vehicle for exploring my own relationship to memory and to the past, both personal and collective; how all its lingerings are a result of both distortion and impact.” Dao Strom interviewed by Claudia Saleeby Savage.
“ARTIFICE IS PART OF THE PROCESS” : LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, MAR 2020
Dao Strom interviewed by Meghan Lamb on the reissue of her book of novellas: ‘The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a collection of four linked stories about four different Vietnamese-American women living in the United States, inspired by Nina Simone’s song “Four Women.” It engages with issues of gender, inheritance, language, and the search for home.’
INTERVIEW W/ CASCADIA MAGAZINE, PUBLISHED 8 FEB 2019
Dao Strom speaks to Lauren Kershner about You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, her bilingual poetry-art book: “I play with fragmentation to play with the notions of framing and re-framing and also failing to frame—refusing to frame—events or memories. Sometimes I let pictures fall off the page or leave out definitive information also because this is how I feel about narrative—I don’t believe the whole story can ever really be told, or can fit on the page.”
PODCAST iNTERVIEW ON THE STEER, RELEASED 22 JAN 2019
Dao Strom in conversation w/ Jeff Alessandrelli for The Steer, a literary podcast talking music with writers and writing with musicians. Dao talks with Jeff about learning to play music in Iowa City, how she maintains her creativity from project to project, Cat Power, why people are occasionally surprised by her love of folk and country music, and her latest projects.
HYBRID INHERITANCES: A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID PALUMBO-LIU & DAO STROM PUBLISHED IN THE MARGINS, 8 NOV 2018
“There is a lot I can ruminate on about distrust—of language, of dominant narratives, of the “mythologies” that come to inform our stories about ourselves or where we come from—especially in regards to the “mythologies” about Vietnam through the lens of America. Maybe as a natural response to this distrust, and to the seeking or undermining that it wants, my creative process has tended toward ambiguity and the middle-spaces.” Dao Strom interviewed by David Palumbo-Liu.
Podcast INTERVIEW ON BETWEEN THE COVERS (W. David Naimon), AUG 2018
Dao Strom interviewed by David Naimon for Tin House podcast Between the Covers, on the release of You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else | Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ, a book of bilingual poetic fragments (AJAR Press). In Dao Strom’s collection of poetic fragments, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ, the fragments are wholly filled—with text: English, Vietnamese, drifting, entwined, dense, vanishing—with space: empty, white, solid, black—with images: cropped, multiplied, sliced, erased—& with punctuation: plus, minus, inequality signs, slashes, brackets, & bullet points imbued with as much meaning as entire novels.
“After you depart from the cinema of her sea, you may ask, what or who is she? . . . why is she able to dismantle my soul so easily? . . . how is she able to make desolation so compellingly hospitable? What is her secret?”—Vi Khi Nao
DAO STROM IN CONVERSATION WITH VI KHI NAO : ASTER(IX) JOURNAL, 18 FEB 2018
Interviewed by Vi Khi Nao: 'Where do I begin to introduce you to Dao Strom? Do I begin with her seduction with sound? The sultry provocation with her own vocal cord or instrumental cord, let’s say guitar? Or her irresistible, indestructible arrangement of images? ...'
OPB Art Beat: “Dao Strom’s Work Aims To Destabilize the American Vietnam Narrative.” Video Profile & Interview, Oct 2017
“Her songs tell stories of burning monks and de-winged goddesses in haunting, dissonant melodies that envelop and stay with listener. Her filmmaking unfolds in fragmented images that evolve quickly and defy easy understanding. Her photography is composed of or inscribed with triangles, often perched on their unstable, pointy ends and challenging the viewer's ability to come up with a straightforward interpretation of the content… Her work requires your work, but invites the viewer inside some of the vast complexities of being a refugee of war, an immigrant or a woman of color in American society, with an unflinching and undeniable authority.” —Jule Gilfillan
THE PORTLAND MERCURY: ”Portland Writer Dao Strom Gives the Past a Soundtrack: We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People Goes Above and Beyond Traditional Memoir.”
Interview with Joshua James Amberson for The Portland Mercury, 2015.
JA: The book seems to be, in part, a radical questioning of what you'd been taught—about everything from cultural history to how to approach writing.
DS: The Western narrative has one hero. Or a triumph of the spirit. Or it has a redemption angle. And I was having a hard time writing that narrative. And that would have been more sellable, definitely, to the publishing houses, because it's a more identifiable narrative. And it kind of tells you what moral side to take, too... [but] every time I tried to write straight there would be these tangents, and I felt that was more in the spirit of whatever Vietnam is. It wants to have many voices and it wants to go in a lot of different directions.
MUSIC REVIEWS
THE WIRE, Music Review for Redux, July 2022
“Dao Strom is a Vietnamese-American polymath based in Portland, Oregon… Redux is a solid listen. The sounds are in an avant dream pop vein, with gentle vocals, acoustic guitar and electronics all burbling along like a Laurel Canyon brook filled with water of the universal subconscious.”
Music Review for Redux album: “The Portland-based artist releases her wonderful second LP.” Sun 13, Apr 2022
"So many artists try to create what Dao Strom has here, but few have captured the heart like this...As far as sparse folk music in 2022 is concerned, there will have to be something truly special to transcend the grace of Dao Strom’s Redux.”
“Ten Quiet Masterpieces From A Deafening Year.” Underscore Music Magazine, Top Ten List (for Traveler’s Ode), Jan 2021
“This music is dense with shadows, but it’s also presented with great clarity, like the startlingly vivid clopping sounds at the beginning of “i have traveled.” It has the precision of poetry, and like poetry it rewards close attention.”
CASSETTE GODS Music Review: “Dao Strom’s TRAVELER’S ODE.'“ Nov 2020
“Strom sings lullabies in a hushed voice that barely stick to the physical plane, becoming mist and memory as soon as the words pass her lips. All devolves into light particles and drifts into the sky. The energy of human interaction is what kept them tethered in the first place.”
OTHER REVIEWS
Review: “Poetry, photography, sound and music fuse together in ‘Instrument’ by artist Dao Strom.” International Examiner. Jul 2021.
Review for Instrument: “Of Self and Other Selves, Adnan, Kennedy & strom.” Dunagan, Patrick James. Periodicity Journal. Feb 2021.
LitHub List: “Loved the closing performance of the National Book Awards? Check out these writer-musicians.” Nov 2020.
Profile: “Meet Dao Strom, 2020 Oregon Literary Fellow.” Literary Arts Blog. Oct 2020.
Review: ‘The Home Inside the Body’ by Genève Chao: “Dao Strom’s beautiful poem/memoir/travelog/contemplation…takes us to another place in the struggle: the struggle within the self, for origin, for belonging, for a state of home…”
Review: ‘When I read Dao Strom’s work I am transported — as though I were suddenly small enough to lie back on an alder leaf..’ on MEDIUM.com
Review: You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else in HONG KONG REVIEW OF BOOKS
”To be situated beyond hope and understanding while yet in the absolute middle of each of those essentialities—this is what it means to be alive in Dao Strom’s You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Such living, then, has degrees of calibration, some easier to swallow than others. The ultimate onus, though, is on the being. To be is to persevere and in persevering comes the allowance of freedom: our endless ability to be set free.”
Review: ‘In poems, Dao Strom attacks the origin of the words she’s learned since leaving Vietnam for America…’ on ARTS HUB AUSTRALIA
"For All of You in the In-Between Spaces: A Review of Dao Strom's We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People" by Meghan Lamb for Entropy Magazine
"Memory Problems": Abby Paige on We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People for Los Angeles Review of Books
Book Review: Eric Nguyen reviews We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People for DiaCRITICS.org
Book Review: We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People in Minor Literature[s]
Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship Artist Profile
"Dao Strom: Reimagining the Book" review & interview by Kim-An Lieberman for diaCRITICS.org
Chicago Tribune Printers Row: "Nelson Algren Short Story Awards: A look back at a rich history"
The New Yorker 'Books Briefly Noted' Review of The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys
Book Review in The Austin Chronicle
Music Review in The Austin Chronicle
"Down By the Old Mainstream" - a short artist profile in No Depression Magazine
NY Times Books in Brief review of Grass Roof, Tin Roof