Wendy Chen Moves Passionately Through Writing and Teaching
Wendy Chenâs work has always been deeply personal.
Her parents, who immigrated to the United States from China, encouraged a young Wendy to study poetry and writing. She remembers her understanding and love of language being bolstered by her bilingual upbringing.
âI grew up interested in language and thinking about the ways that we move between languages, and how words have this very transformative life of their own in our daily lives,â Chen says.
And now, her dissertation as a Ph.D. candidate in the żì»îappâs department of English, titled âUnderstudy,â draws on the grief sheâs experiencing related to her fatherâs dementia.
âWriting has always been a way for me to work through intense emotions and experiences that are sort of hard to make sense of,â Chen reflects.
The heart of the dissertation is an epic poem, titled âMoly.â
âIt comes from the name of this mythical flower in âThe Odyssey,â and it riffs off of the imagery and the journey of âThe Odyssey,â in thinking through grief, with my father's dementia,â she says.
A central part of Chenâs process in writing her dissertation is the incorporation of dream logic, which Chen defines as the idea of how dreams can inform oneâs writing. Her understanding of the tactic came from żì»îapp professor Patrick Cottrell, who teaches a class on the subject.
âWe kept a dream journal, and we learned how to lucid dream,â she remembers. Cottrellâs teachings and guidance, Chen says, truly helped to shape her dissertation.
âThere can be something very meaningful about dream logic and how that could be more truthful to grief and the grieving process, when rationality and waking life and facts don't really help us to make sense of what has happenedâif something has ended, like an illness or a death,â she says.
Thereâs a roster of other żì»îapp English professors who Chen says have helped influence her writings. In particular, she mentions Selah Saterstrom, who teaches Divinatory Poetics and âhas such a compelling perspective on the tarot, divination, poetry and life.â
And Chen recalls the âwonderful, discerning editorial eyeâ of her dissertation director, Graham Foust, who assisted her during negotiations for her post-grad position.
Though she is about to finish her final academic pursuit, Chen isnât at all new to the world of publishing; sheâs already an author several times over.
In elementary school, Chen wrote poems that her teachers would laminate and bind into booksâthe first of several books of poetry that she would eventually go on to produce.
Chenâs first book of poems, âUnearthings,â was published in 2018. Like much of her work, the collection draws on her personal experiences. She writes that âthe collectionâs narratives of isolation, exile, and immigration explore what it means to be an Asian American woman.â
And Chen has two forthcoming volumes: a novel, âTheir Divine Fires,â publishing in 2024; and a book of translations of Chinese poetry, titled âThe Magpie at Night: Complete Translations of Li Qingzhaoâs Poetry,â which will be out in 2025.
The next leg of Chenâs professional journey will see her take on a tenure-track English professorship at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in the fall.
She says the opportunities for teaching she had at żì»îapp helped to build her confidence as an educator, crediting the departmentâs professors with guiding her through the teaching process.
âI think having the opportunity to teach, to lead classes on my own and be the instructor on record has been really valuable for me to really, firmly know that this is what I want to do, and this is where I want to go.
âI think, in order to learn how to be a teacher, you do have to teach and have that experience, right?â she says. âYou can talk about it all you want, like, âThis is how we might run a class,â but you never really can replicate what it's like, being in front of the classroom and having all these different perspectives come at you. And figuring out how to navigate that can be very hard to impart without that experience. So having that experience, having the mentorship of the department, I think that's been very invaluable.â