Hoa Nguyen | Issue 4

Interview

Hoa Nguyen, 2021

Micro Interview with Hoa Nguyen

Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?

Hoa Nguyen: This was of illustrated stories I wrote in elementary school. One featured a frog named Hiccup who had series of adventures with friends. Another portrayed a disadvantaged puppy (the “runt” of the litter”) who matures into the world with a journey marked by gains and losses. I was also fond of making illustrated comic books full of angst, humor, and absurdity. I think I always wanted to be a writer, secretly. And a poet. In Vietnam, there is a custom where you present several objects to your child on their one-year birthday: a pile of money, a pen, a stethoscope, a pair of scissors, other vocational symbolic objects, etc. The item(s) the child grabs foretells their future occupation. I grabbed the pen.

KM: Tell me about your latest collection, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure and the story that inspired this book.

HN: The book is inspired by many things; pri…