By Yong Shu Hoong

When Mary Jean Chan was approached by QLRS to do this Proust Questionnaire, she acknowledged in her email reply, "Incidentally, QLRS was where I first published my poetry (ever!), so I have fond memories of reading and submitting to QLRS back in 2013/14."

The Hong Kong-born poet has leapt ahead in the international poetry scene since those early days. Her debut collection Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019) won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize.

Pronounced as "flesh" (a wordplay that is apt for the many poems of longing and vulnerability contained herein), the book title is the French word for "arrow" – also an offensive technique in fencing, a sport in which she has competed in Hong Kong and internationally. Asian Review of Books praised Flèche as a "significant and original contribution to Hong Kong poetry as well as to the current scene of British Asian diasporic voices" that interrogates "the complexities of love, history and the power of naming through refreshing experimentation in language and form."

Currently based in London, Chan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. In Spring 2020, she served as guest co-editor alongside Will Harris at The Poetry Review.

  1. What are you reading right now?
Lot by Bryan Washington (Atlantic Books). It's an amazing book of short stories that reads like a novel.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
  I'd love to be Jo March (I admired her masculine energy and her passion for writing as a teenager when I first read Little Women). Incidentally, my partner's name is Jo (Josephine), and she is actually named after Josephine March.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
  That I am a tidy and organised person (you should see my desk and my desktop).

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
  Living author: Will Harris (we're good friends and I have a lot of respect for his poetry and prose).    Dead author: Adrienne Rich (her poetry and essays helped me come out in my early 20s). 

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
  I do, as I'm going through it right now. I think patience is key, and sometimes not writing should be acceptable too. Writers can be very hard on themselves, sometimes unnecessarily. 

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Vision, tenacity and compassion.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Self-righteousness. 

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Joy is not made to be a crumb." – Mary Oliver

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
  love feeding people and watching people eat. 

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
  A tragedy, as they're often quite thought-provoking. 

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
At the moment, my favourite word is "racial imaginary" (it's two words, sorry!).   My least favourite word is "identity" (we all have identities, but it's increasingly used in literary circles in the UK to mean folks with marginalised identities, when being white, straight and a Londoner is as much an identity as being Chinese, queer and from Hong Kong). 

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: glaze, silent, hand.
My writer's block won't permit me to complete this task at present. 

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A cup of tea (preferably Tieguanyin). 

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Morning (before I check my emails) or in the late afternoon (after I've checked my emails).

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
  William Stoner (from John Williams's Stoner: A Novel), the Little Prince (from Antoine De Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince) and Cesario/Viola (from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night). They just seem like such interesting people. I'd love to meet them.

16. With Flèche lauded for how it approaches multilingualism and queerness, do you see your next collection of poems as a continuation or deviation in concept?
I think the next book will still touch on these issues but may be formally somewhat different. I am currently drawn to prose poems, so they might feature in my next collection more significantly than in Flèche.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
  I've lived according to my own rules. 

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