This City, This Desert: A Conversation with Justine Chan
Should You Lose All Reason(s) by Justine Chan is a debut collection of poetry from Chin Music Press that centers around a Southern Paiute legend about the Coyote. In this legend, a father tells his family to burn his body on a pyre when he dies; to run and not look back. Unlike his mother and sisters, the only son looks back, and sees the father alive and now enraged by the disobedience. A chase ensues, and the family must escape by jumping into the stars, leaving behind the father. Because he snaps at their heels, they transform him into a coyote, doomed to howl at the night sky, estranged from his loved ones forever.
Made up of three long-form poems, this collection forms a triptych, entwining the lonesome call of the Coyote, the deserts of Zion National Park where Chan served as a National Park Ranger, and the speaker’s journeys across the United States. I had the privilege of sitting down with Justine Chan over Zoom, where we discussed the intersection of nature and race in Chan’s writing, as well as her time in AmeriCorps and the National Park Service. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Genevieve Hartman: You retell a Southern Paiute legend about the origin of the Coyote in the preface and then the poems kind of dialogue with this folktale throughout the book. What drew you to this story in particular?
Justine Chan: I wanted to specifically tell a Southern Paiute folktale, given that their range covers so much of Utah and Nevada, and I wanted it to feel like a local story. And this story was one of two I told in the evening program [as a National Park Ranger]. I really liked this one because it was so haunting and so full of questions. It’s about a strange family dynamic, but also it is one of those explanatory folktales too, with a full story behind it. A lot of other Coyote stories tend to center on Coyote being a trickster or being really goofy and interacting with other animals. But I really liked how this one was about his family and the dynamic happening between them; the family essentially says to him, Because you love the desert, we’re turning you into a coyote and you have to stay here. I feel that really meant a lot to me and stood out to me when I was working at Zion.
GH: It’s such a rich story, and there’s so much that happens within it. You talk a little about this in the ending notes of the collection, about not wanting to overshadow the fact that this is not exactly your story to tell. What steps did you take to honor this story’s origins as a Southern Paiute legend while also making it your own and incorporating it into your writing?
JC: I wanted to make sure that when I was first writing it, I really was just responding to it. And then once I was working on my book contract, I tried to reach out and figure out the best ways to get permission. I did talk to Dorena Martineau of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah; she is the cultural chair. She’s the daughter of one of the authors of the books the folktale is told in. It was funny because she didn’t have that much to say; she just said, “The retelling is good, you’re okay.” But I had to make sure I treated the story with respect, tracing this lineage, this heritage that isn’t mine. The context of it being a winter’s tale is interesting, too, knowing that it’s told during the winter, during the harvest season and part of this big storytelling event.
GH: So did it have more of an oral tradition prior to the other retellings within books?
JC: So most of these stories, at least for the Southern Paiute, are told during the winter when the piñon nuts are being harvested. I think with a lot of these oral histories, I studied this more at Mount Rainier National Park, but with these oral histories, there’s not really a beginning or an end. There’s not necessarily a moral to the story, always. And a lot of settler colonization has changed the stories over time. The white Victorian settlers who recorded them wanted these stories, which seemed like fragments and memories that were passed down, to follow a story arc and have a moral. So the story could be changed and altered through time. The way this story [of the Coyote] has gotten passed down and written down is so different from how it might have originally come about, and when it’s published like this, it’s not necessarily what it would have sounded like being told at the harvest story time.
GH: You’re adding to this beautiful (and maybe not so beautiful) transformative process. You mentioned the piñon trees as a part of the harvest, and also in the second poem, “The Holes in the Story,” which oscillates between the legend of the Coyote and the piñon trees and their degradation over time due to climate change. Is that something that you saw firsthand as you were working as a park ranger?
JC: It’s hard to tell with all the smaller things like the bark beetles. I don’t think I’ve actually seen those. But driving through the landscape—I first visited Zion in 2014, and then in 2017—there are parts where you can see the trees dying out, and it’s all really dry. Because the park has the Zion River running through it, it feels lusher and more riparian and greener than other parts of the desert. But the whole area has definitely been affected by the mega drought and climate change and the bark beetles.
GH: I love the shape of the book—flipped on its side, in landscape instead of in portrait. Once I opened the book, it made sense, because you have these really long lines, almost approaching prose poems. What draws you to this longer line as you’re writing?
JC: I started writing the book in a sketchbook that my friend had sent me. It just made sense—the sketchbook is landscape oriented—for me to visualize the lines as longer. And I have a more prosy background. I studied prose in my MFA; I was writing a lot of short stories and also poetry. But I’ve always walked that cross-genre line. When we were putting the book together, it was really important for me that it kept the long lines. I wanted the words to look like they were taking over the paper. If it were vertically oriented, it would have lost a lot of that.
GH: I just love this: The book is physically shaped by the poems. I noticed that you use a lot of slashes and parentheses as well. Do those parentheses and slashes come from that same desire for the words to take over the page?
JC: Yeah, I’ve always admired those punctuations because I think the way I write. I really like slashes even beyond this book, because it’s a line break, but it’s also that stutter or two things are happening at once, or two opposite ideas. When I was working with the book designer, he noticed that too, and thought it would be great if the parentheses and the splashes were made bigger. So that’s why they appear more prominently. It was fun to be able to see that happening typographically too.
GH: “The City I Call,” the poem that forms the bulk of the book, moves between so many cities at once. Despite its length, it has this wonderfully sustained movement; it captures the attention in part because of the song lyrics you intersperse throughout the poem. I wish that I’d had enough time to sit down and listen to every single one. But I recognized many songs, and as I was reading through, I was singing along to myself. You’re also a songwriter and musician, right? How do your music writing and your creative writing inform each other?
JC: I felt like the lyrics were really important to have in “The City I Call” because being a musician, I think a lot about lyrics, and I wanted a way to bring the music in as a sort of sampler in the book. I think a lot about the rhythm of language, the way words sound together, maybe more so than if I wasn’t a musician. But I always think of myself as more like a musician who also writes. It’s easier for me to think about music than writing, and it’s more fun to play music than to write. I do think they speak to each other. The songwriting process is different from writing poetry, but they’re related. I feel like all my songs and my writing are in conversation.
GH: I felt that so much in the collection. There’s this sense of unsurety, I think, and there’s not much resolution at the end of the book. Were you comfortable with where it ended, how it doesn’t tie things up neatly in a bow? Was that something that was important for you to keep within the collection? The sense of wondering what’s going to happen next?
JC: Yes. I do think it moves through an arc by the end of “The City I Call.” But I do like the ambiguity, where it can feel unresolved and it can go in any way. And I think that’s the point, where at least it’s a different note than at the end of the folks here, which is really sorrowful and there’s a very clear separation between the Coyote and his family.
GH: It feels like there’s so much possibility at the end of your collection, and I think that ambiguity is beautiful in that way because you can sort of go wherever with it.
I’m always interested in reading authors of color who write about the natural world, both because I’m a person of color who loves the natural world and because it still feels like a lot of eco-writing spaces are pretty white-dominated, and people of color are “supposed” to write about race. Your book does mention race at times, but did you feel that confinement while you were working on this book?
JC: When I was a ranger, I experienced this more at Mount Rainier. But I still saw it at Zion, too, where my peers were almost all white rangers. They were basically park ranger bros who had the privilege to not care about social issues or what was going on in the city, whereas I always felt like, I come from somewhere and I still care about the bigger picture. I’m not just here in the park to have fun. Being in the very white-centered, white supremacist space of the National Park Service meant dealing with microaggressions and institutionalized racism, and I often felt like a diversity hire.
And this is one of the big issues with environmental writing: The environmental movement is so white. Often people ask, How do we get more people of color out into the wilderness? without looking at the bigger picture of what others go through, and what sort of social justice needs to happen before everyone can have the privilege to go out into the spaces and enjoy nature.
GH: Yeah. Sometimes it feels like being able to enjoy nature is an elective, but no! That’s something that should be for everybody. Why isn’t it?
JC: Yeah, it totally should be.
GH: I love that your story is here. I was drawn to this book because I was intrigued that you were in the National Park Service. I think of a National Park ranger, a white guy pops into my head. So it’s cool that you’re sharing your story and also are highlighting and uplifting the work of an Indigenous tribe as well while you’re doing it.
It’s interesting to me, too, that this collection is centered around the natural world, but it’s also very city-based. Can you talk about the relationships between time in the city versus time in the parks, and how those two things interplay?
JC: I grew up in the Chicago area, often going into the city with my family, and then when I was older, always going on my own. It’s always felt like such a special place. I feel really alive and excited in the city. I love being in a big crowd and knowing my way through, and I always feel in love with that. And ever since I was little, I wanted to save the world, which has always drawn me to environmental movement fields and into conservation and stewardship. It’s always hard to reconcile those two sides. But it’s funny because when I was in the AmeriCorps program, it was my first time hiking with folks. On our days off, we would find a hike and it was like, Oh, this is actually very fun and exciting! That was my first exposure to it.
I’ve done a lot more hiking since moving out to Seattle, and I still feel really new to it. I always feel that there’s still something foreign about hiking, even though I really love it and I’m drawn to it and I feel peaceful with it. It’s funny just thinking that I didn’t grow up with it and having to balance both sides.
GH: Throughout the collection, the speaker or speakers have this very deep sense of wandering and of searching for home. In the first poem, there’s these beautiful lines: “You will always be looking for home. You will always be in love with too many places. You will nest in other people even / though they will leave you… / (or they will stay and love you and you will be confused.)” This captures so well how transience causes conflict or discomfort over time between the speaker and their loved ones. I’m wondering, is the speaker running away from something or running towards something? Or is it a little bit of both?
JC: I think it’s a little bit of both. A lot of the experiences that I was trying to capture in this book are from after I graduated from college. I spent a year at home and then I went and spent a year serving in a program called AmeriCorps. It was pseudo-military; I was first based in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and then I was assigned a team and we all wore uniforms and were deployed to different natural disasters. We spent the most time responding to Hurricane Sandy in the New York area. And that year was so difficult and so chaotic and really amazing all at once.
When I finished that and was doing my MFA, I didn’t really know how to write about it. I was trying to write short stories, and I couldn’t really get to it. Like, I really needed nonfiction, some kind of form, but it just took me a long time to get there. And I also didn’t feel my MFA program was very supportive of cross-genre work or supportive of me as a person of color in the workshop.
A lot of that AmeriCorps year was watching my friends quit the program. I was often anguished and frustrated that it wasn’t a great program, that we weren’t able to help as much as we could. One feeling we always had was, Oh, we could always quit and go home, but then we couldn’t really. What would our family say? What would our parents think? That we went off and tried to do something and couldn’t even finish what we started. And I think that’s kind of followed me in a lot of ways of like, Oh, this is harder. Certain experiences were harder than I thought when I was at Zion, but I couldn’t go home. I had to be there. And I chose to be there. It was that ricocheting between wanting to be there and trying to escape something, but then not being able to quite find where was comfortable and at home.
Justine Chan is a writer, poet, and singer-songwriter from Chicago. Should You Lose All Reason(s) (Chin Music Press, 2023) is her first book. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Beecher’s, Booth, Poetry on Buses, and Midwestern Gothic among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and has worked many seasons as a park ranger with the National Park Service. She currently lives in Seattle. Find more of Justine on her YouTube channel or at justinechan.com.
Genevieve Hartman (she/her) is a Korean American writer based in Rochester, New York. She is Publicist for Alice James Books, Social Media & Outreach Coordinator for Adi Magazine, and an Art Editor for Gasher Journal. Her poems and reviews have been published in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi Review, Singapore Unbound, River Mouth Review, and others. Follow her on Instagram at @gena_hartman, on Twitter at @gena_hartman1, or connect at genahartman.com.