Quotes From a Talk by Ocean Vuong

I think being a good teacher is very similar to being a good friend.

Of course there are things you say and do with friends you shouldn't do with teachers but the relationship, the ethics of it is very similar.

Being a good teacher is very much like being a good friend. And there are some friendships where you encounter the person on the road and they kinda block the road and they say okay in order to be my friend you have to do this, this and this. Got it? Do I have a deal otherwise it's not gonna work. If you agree then we'll go together.

On the other hand, Ben Learner as a teacher was like the other friend who was walking behind you and he goes in front of you and he says, "Come on! We gotta go", and he's already ahead and he's just saying "Let's go. We gotta get on our way". And so there's this a sort of collaborative approach that this mystery of education and the search for knowledge and creativity is a field in which the teacher is participating as well as leading and I think that it altered my expectations of who I could be both as a writer but also as a teacher and I have them to thank for that.

What wish for my poems to do, they satisfy me in a moment in time and then I published them and then I say oh I could've done something different. I don't know they could be better but different. They change or my desire for them change according to how I change which is a beautiful thing.

I think no one really saves us in this world but people give us the tools so that we can transform towards our own rescue and I think that is true with poems.

We write them and they're good enough and then we let them go. Part of the act of writing is abandonment, and the best way to update a poem is perhaps to write the next one.

When I was a younger writer starting out in my 20s, I loved rules.

I want to know all the rules because the rules are like the guard rails on the highway.

You feel very comforted driving knowing that you know you have to go straight and you turn according to what the municipal planners have given you but if you follow the guardrail and the road you will only go to what is known on the GPS.

You will only go to places that have already been discovered and explored ahead of you.

In other words, you're following rather than truly going and endeavoring and I think for so many queer folks after a while you realize that this road was never made with me in mind and I have to stop the car get out of it and climb over this guardrail and now I'm wandering far away from everything that I've known far away from anything that has a name or a sign or a road signal and I'm in the middle of the forest or the meadow and I'm terrified I'm washed with confusion and fear and there's almost this ecstatic terror that comes over me because I'm truly lost.

But I'm also perhaps the most free I've ever been and everything I feel every step I take is something new to me. It is a discovery and from here I have to make a life and I think that to me is queerness. It's just finding the courage or having no choice but to get off the road and explore. And I think that's where I am now as a practitioner in my work I don't know all the rules that I learned have been disproven either by others or by my own work and I realized that I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm just following the curiosity that the work of the writer is to not so much nail anything down but to make space for the endeavor of curiosity to widen the theater of wonder.

I think we don't talk enough about vulnerability as a normal condition.

We often see vulnerability as weakness but when you talk to somebody even just for half an hour, you realize that all sorts of people in every category every identity marker are vulnerable.

That vulnerability is the most normal human condition I've ever encountered as a person spending 33 years on earth and I think we build barriers to hide it. We build mechanisms to out of the shame of the vulnerable but the vulnerable is actually more normal more human than bravado or even irony or you know the the masculinous mask of power that is very brief.

Those are brief performances but vulnerability is actually the most pervasive out of 24 hours out of the day. I would argue that the majority of those hours are spent feeling vulnerable and we do everything we can to hide that because we have relegated that out of what is acceptable in society.

So I tell my students to bring down the shield that you have been taught since you were in kindergarten to fortify that shield and to take down the armor and to step out into your work and your world and to collaborate with your vulnerability is the most powerful and strengthening thing you can ever do as an artist.

It is to say that my vulnerability is my power because it is where all care comes from. It is where all the this desire for improvement and my connection to others. My compassion comes from my understanding that I am a very as a species. I'm a very soft species. I'm a very weak species physically perhaps even mentally and there's something to say about the desire to destroy vulnerability so much in our culture. We see in entertainment, books, news, articles, the arenas of recreation and sports even and how we celebrate each other is to destroy vulnerability.

But the problem is that vulnerability ironically is the strongest thing. It can never be destroyed. It is always there and the more we allow it to come forward and the more we are forgiving of each other for expressing vulnerability. I think the stronger you can be both as a writer a student and a human being.