Two Questions with Ashley Yang-Thompson
Author of How to Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World Ever! Encouragement for Struggling Creatives (Bateau Press, 2021)
Welcome to our first mini-interview! Two Questions is a little interview series that gives me an excuse to talk to authors, publishers, and people who create things that expand the world of creative possibilities for anyone who encounters them.
I came upon Ashley Yang-Thompson’s writing/art/zine practice through Bateau Press, a small press based at College of the Atlantic that puts out lovely little letterpress chapbooks of poetry and short prose.
Yang-Thompson’s work was like nothing else Bateau had published, and like nothing I’d ever seen before. I ordered the spectacularly titled How to Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World Ever! Encouragement for Struggling Creatives because I wanted to share a motivational resources with my students that didn’t take writing too seriously, that opened our brains and hearts to the fundamental messiness of the whole thing while also being rooted in a profuse creative practice. It blew all of our minds. So did Ashley’s virtual visit to our class, along with the kind envelope of materials (stickers! postcards! pamphlets!) she sent to us before she visited.
How to Be the Worst includes manifestos for making art (“A breakdown precipitates a breakthrough to the heart of being”), but these are just one among the many page formats that include drawn, grotesque images of people’s pimples exploding, footed intestines screeching for inner peace, and visual analogues between the stars, grains of sand, and “the especially large pores on your oily nose.” It’s kind of indescribable, all the art and thought it compounds, and by the time I finished reading it, personally, I was ready to re-devote my life to art (if I hadn’t already).
How to Be the Worst, and much of her creative practice, is rooted Ashley’s creation of serial zines like Worm House, mixed media installations, and painting. I had two questions for Ashley and a request for reading recommendations (my questions are in bold), and she answered them all in a majestic mini-essay below.
How do you stay connected to surprise and vibrant energy and constant self-questioning (in form and content too) in your art/writing/creating? I get the sense that your creative practice is truly a practice, in that the “products” (zines, chapbooks, installations) are just a small part of what is ultimately taking place. When I read your chapbook, I feel like I’m also somehow living in creativity/creation just by experiencing it. How does your creative practice make all this work and keep it alive for you as a person? And how do you account for and/or reject and/or problematize the rules that are supposed to bound us in the process of making things?
What does it all mean? Like, what does writing/drawing/making art mean for you in the larger context of your life? What keeps you coming back to it?
And finally, do you have any recommendations of recent things to read/look at/experience you’d like to share with us?
Ashley Yang-Thompson: It is impossible to grow up without constant self-questioning. Jung said, "The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life." Some people want art to take a stance, but what's true for me is obscurity: an abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fest. The only time I was totally convinced of my perspective was when I was twenty-two. But really I was using my intellect to rationalize my feelings as facts. I'm 31 now, and I know far less than I knew a decade ago. The ambition to be a great artist has been superceded by the project of individuation. My creativity is being channeled into therapy as I redefine my relationship to art. A person becomes many persons in the course of a single lifespan, so an artist must do, un- do, and re-do their vows to art ad infinitum. As a child, art was an escape from the chaos of life. In puberty and the extended puberty of my early twenties, my primary motive was an insatiable yearning for approval and validation. I used to be inexorable, now I am profoundly tired. Art is a spiritual practice. It is the practice of obeying the pulse of your own integrity; creating without looking over your shoulder, making for the sake of making. Creating out of the pressure to perform leads to burnout, exhaustion, and despair. Art is the residue of living the question, "What is urgent to me?" It is a positive exorcism of my unconscious hungers.
I have been in a state of wonder reading everything I can find by the Jungian analysts James Hollis and Marion Woodman. And it has taken me awhile to respond to your questions because I cannot put down Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet (I recommend pairing her novels with Toni Morrison's Sula). My Brilliant Friend captures the porous quality of intense friendships; I could not have written or made Worm House or Worm Slut or How to be the worst... or my latest chapbook, The Philosophical Pedagogy of Ash Yang-Thompson, which is in a perpetual state of Flux without my brilliant friends. Their ideas have become a part of me; I am happily colonized by those who are most dear and hilarious to me. I could not be myself without relatedness.
Addendum: My father died in May 2022, and I immediately wrote a dozen dead dad poems. I thought that smack of death would snap me back into action, and my depression would give way to productivity. The grief has caught up to me, and I am moving at the velocity of a rock. My art is how I integrate this pain into my life as I relearn how breathe, as I grow my own spine. My art is being present for my life. It is putting away my phone and responding to world with awe.
Yes! All of this. Here’s the line that’s really sticking out to me right now:
“Art is a spiritual practice. It is the practice of obeying the pulse of your own integrity; creating without looking over your shoulder, making for the sake of making.”
Thanks so much to Ashley Yang-Thompson for bringing us into the flow. Check out her chapbooks How to Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World Ever! Encouragement for Struggling Creatives and keep an eye out for The Philosophical Pedagogy of Ash Yang-Thompson, coming soon from Bateau Press.