Meet Our New Intern: Ruoyu Wang

I wish I could speak to a transformative, empowering journey of childhood reading, but I don’t think my relationship to creative writing really began to mean anything until I was 15. I grew up in suburban Tennessee near Knoxville and towards the end of elementary school, I moved to a suburb of Seattle. Like many other writers, my childhood had been punctuated by whatever book I was then reading, and then the next (Little House on the Prairie, or YA romances later on),  but only when my relationship to poetry was complicated by workshop did creative writing emerge as something essential to me. 

The summer after 10th grade, I had the opportunity to attend the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and have Logan Hoffman-Smith as my teacher, in addition to several lovely classmates. By then, I was already infatuated with writing. I obsessed over rhythm or the perfect turn of phrase; I turned in poems that I’d written about love, trauma, or loss. The workshop had been titled Troubling the Voice, and indeed, Logan urged me to interrogate my writing more sincerely. I think about their advice to me all the time: that I have to be writing about either what I either really want to talk about or what I really don’t want to talk about at all, and what I was already saying—supposedly about love and loss—was not that.

Since then, I’ve been trying to ask myself every week what compels me to write and why I keep returning to writing in the first place. I’m a freshman in college now, and one upside of such a transitional period in life is that I finally feel like I have some sort of answer. 

I love stories about people who spend too much time on the internet and kids who are up to all kinds of weird, stupid stuff; I love characters who are too angry, hurt, or confused. I’m not a fiction writer quite yet but those depictions of shame and grief in others’ work informs so much about my own artistic creation, whether in poems or elsewhere. For example, reading Alexander Chee’s personal essay “The Autobiography of My Novel” or Kelly X. Hui’s short story “Iphigenia” for the first time felt life-changing. In 11th grade, I took an art history class, and I still relate one installation we learned about—Pepón Osorio’s En la barbería no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop)—to moments in my life all the time. 

Above everything else, in my own work and in engaging with others’, I’m thinking about it in the context of things like queerness, Asianness, borders/diaspora, and ongoing forces of imperialism and colonialism. Kelly X. Hui and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong (a past Sundress intern!) are both incredible, lovely writers—who I admittedly and sentimentally see as older cousin-ish figures—and they lead their creative lives with so much astonishing dedication to the communities around them. 

Like Kaylee and Kelly, I want to ask what kind of world we are building with and for each other while creating art. Another one of my friends (she’s so brilliant…) told me once, years ago, that for the process of revision, her goal is to locate the heart of a story or poem and, from there, ask how best it can be brought to the surface. That’s how I’ve tried to approach writing ever since.

More about me: I love postcards, sincere emails, bridges, shakshuka, the movie God’s Own Country, and I hope to figure out the short-story-writing thing soon. 

I’m so excited to see where my time at Sundress takes me. Sundress takes so much initiative to platform underrepresented voices and create a more accessible literary community, and I’m so grateful to be able to play a part in that.

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Ruoyu Wang is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.