Photograph of Kristen Chen
Author Interview: Kristen Chen
Ashland MFA Faculty
interviewed by melissa giggey, mfa candidate
Kirstin Chen is a New York Times best-selling author of three novels and teaches creative
writing in the Ashland University MFA program as well as joined the faculty at Sewanee Writer’s Conference this past summer.
Her latest novel, Counterfeit, is a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, a Roxane Gay book club pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Counterfeit is a criminal caper that peers behind the curtain of upscale designer storefronts and the Chinese factories where luxury goods are produced. It is smart, witty, and widely popular as a #bookstagram and #booktok pick. Her previous novels Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners both published to rave reviews.
In January I was ecstatic to learn that Kirstin would be my very first MFA faculty professor. I was intimidated and nervous, but logging in to our first Zoom session, Kirstin’s cheerfulness and genuine interest in me and my work put me at ease. I couldn’t have been in better hands. Over the course of 4 months, Kirstin instinctively understood the tone, voice, and themes of my novel in progress. She challenged me to question character backgrounds and helped me understand more complex plot structures. Thus began my MFA in creative writing.
I am grateful for her time and dedication in our one-on-one class. It was a dream first MFA class. I recently had the chance to catch up with her while she was on a writer’s retreat in the Bay Area.
MG: As a fellow teacher, I wonder about the positive or negative effects of teaching creative writing on your own creative process.
KC: Generally speaking, I find teaching creative writing to be extremely complimentary to my own writing. My students constantly teach me new approaches to storytelling and new ways of understanding stories I've read multiple times before. Additionally, my students remind me how lucky we all are to be able to devote some portion of our lives to reading and writing. When you’ve been writing for a while, like I have, and your social circle consists almost entirely of other writers, it can be easy to get jaded, to take things for granted, to forget how magical this job can be.
MG: Definitely. After 20 years in the secondary classroom, I can always tell when an educator no longer finds the act of teaching as a discovery. Because honestly, we can all get jaded. And I agree that education requires an ability to recognize students’ journeys and walk alongside them. I really appreciated your willingness to delve into my work with me! I’m also curious as to whether your experience with Counterfeit’s success changed your writing process or approach to your next work in progress?
KC: I sold my next novel to my editor on summary, before I’d even started writing the book, so that’s been a huge change. Typically, I don’t begin with an outline or summary because the act of discovery is such a big part of my process. With my first two books, I wrote 2-3 drafts before I even felt capable of mapping out the plot. So, having to think through the story prior to writing has been an adjustment. In fact, I feared I’d lose all interest in the story since I already had a good idea of how things would pan out. Much of this early drafting process has been about figuring out what’s going to hold my interest in this book, and what else is left to discover. (Thankfully there’s been a lot!)
MG: I love that you want to be interested in your story while you write. The act of discovery has really been a learning curve for me. I also think most writers always have a little nudge toward recognition in the back of their minds. I know I do. You are a three-time published author but have experienced commercial success and wide recognition with Counterfeit being a Reese’s Book Club pick. What has surprised you about the feeling of overnight success or fame? Any advice for writers – published and unpublished?
KC: The success doesn’t feel “overnight” at all, and I’m grateful for it! It would have been amazing, of course, to have come out with a big debut, but I learned so much about being a writer from publishing two “quieter” books first. One specific thing I’ve learned is that while it is such a privilege to reach a wide audience, you also end up reaching many people outside your target readers who you perhaps didn’t intend to write the story for, and who consequently have different reading expectations. Compare that to my second—and least read—novel, Bury What We Cannot Take. The people who picked up that book had to seek it out, and so they were really interested in the subject or time period or setting, and there’s something very special about having that direct connection to your intended audience.
On a related note, I think most writers will say that the number of copies sold has quite little to do with how good the book actually is. Sometimes they’re correlated, sometimes not at all. So that would be my advice: try as much as possible to separate the publishing process from the writing process.
MG: You said that there’s something very special about having a direct connection to your intended audience. When you are in the first couple of drafts, do you have an intended audience in mind? How much does that influence your day-to-day writing? Or does the audience start to crystalize after a few drafts? For instance: Who was the intended audience for Counterfeit and was it different from Bury What We Cannot Take?
KC: I think consciously about audience fairly early on in the drafting process. Often, I myself am part of my audience—I’m writing the book I want to read. But even that has some nuance to it. So, for instance, with Bury What We Cannot Take, the self I was writing to was someone who is part of the Chinese diaspora but has never felt a strong connection to China and is grappling with that fact. And then the audience expands out from there. In Counterfeit, the self I was writing to is someone who identifies as Asian, Asian American, and a US immigrant (who also happens to be an armchair handbag expert.)
Some helpful context—Matt Salesses talks about concentric rings of audiences in his excellent Craft In The Real World. Here’s a quote from an interview he gave that explains this: “I ask my students to think about three concentric rings of audience (I learned this from Mat Johnson). The most immediate audience, the audience at the center, is their first reader(s). Then there’s an ideal audience of readers who might understand nearly everything the author intends (I tell my students to think of a group of maybe a thousand people). Finally, there’s the audience that could make the book a bestseller, which would include people outside of the ideal audience, who would still enjoy the book. Outside of that, anyone can make the effort of reading into different expectations, which is also important for a book’s life but is not an audience to worry about inthe writing.”
MG: That is also comforting news for an emerging writer. You can write the book you want to read regardless of how specific the topic or how narrow the interest. So what are you working on now?
KC: I’m working on a novel called Tech Wives that looks at the myth of genius tech founders and, more importantly, the women who support them. The main characters are a pair of best friends who grapple with their loyalty, complicity, and guilt after marrying some of the world’s wealthiest tech billionaires.
MG: I can’t wait to hear more about Tech Wives! Will there be any space exploration financing and dreams of space colonization from your tech giants? Every time I see one of the newly built rockets by Musk or Bezos all I see are phallic symbols.
KC: You know, because the book’s focus is so tightly trained on the spouses of these powerful men, I don’t delve too deeply into the founders themselves. Their work and their ambitions are all playing out in the background. This is intentional. So much has been written about the excessiveness and outrageousness of these men that it actually strikes me as the least interesting part of the story.
Kirstin continues to share her book Counterfeit on tour and signings in the US and international audiences. She will be at The American Library in Paris on November 22nd and Books and Burlesque, Caveat in New York City on December 9th. You can learn more about Kirstin Chen’s novels at kirstinchen.com or follow her fabulous foodie post and gravity-defying feats of Ashtanga yoga practice on Instagram @kirstin.chen
About the interviewer
Melissa Giggey is an author and teacher whose writing has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Education Column and Madeleine L’Engle official website blog. She holds a Masters in Secondary English Education and is writing her first YA novel in the MFA Creative Writing program at Ashland University. Melissa lives on Lake Lanier in North Georgia where she loves adventure and living deliberately with her husband, two teenage sons, three cats, and a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Follow her on Instagram @melissagiggey