In the first episode of season two, I have the pleasure of speaking with writer, editor, and playwright May Ngo. I talked to May about the process of writing her first novel, the whiteness of crime fiction, the traumas of academia, and how pregnancy is a Tower moment.
In the first episode of season two, I have the pleasure of speaking with writer, editor, and playwright May Ngo. I talked to May about the process of writing her first novel, the whiteness of crime fiction, the traumas of academia, and how pregnancy is a Tower moment.
May is a writer, editor and former academic with a PhD in anthropology. She is Australian of Teo Chew Chinese-Cambodian descent currently based in Prague, Czech Republic. She has been commissioned to write audio dramas, reviews, essays, editing, research, and copywriting as well as other creative collaborations.
You can find more of her work at mayngo.net
To read the transcript, go to the episode page here.
🍄 sign up for microdosing ceremony, a weekly-ish letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
🐇 explore creative rabbit holes on my website.
Note: I manually transcribe podcast audio, and lightly edit for flow and clarity.
Welcome to season two of Ceremony, a podcast about dreaming new worlds into being.
In the second season, you will hear from writers about the process of working on their first books, and the pleasures, pains, and joys that they have experienced.
I can’t wait to meet you there, in the ether, somewhere between the earth and stars.
In the first episode of season two, I have the pleasure of speaking with May Ngo. May is a writer, editor and former academic with a PhD in anthropology. She is Australian of Teo Chew Chinese-Cambodian descent currently based in Prague, Czech Republic. She has been commissioned to write audio dramas, reviews, essays, editing, research, and copywriting as well as other creative collaborations. You can find more of her work on her website: mayngo.net
Laura Joyce:
Welcome, May. I'm really pleased to be able to have a conversation with you today. I was really excited to have this conversation with you, because we've always had really interesting conversations when we've worked together in the past, and there are so many things that I want to ask you about.
And first of all, I'd just like to start by asking you about your debut novel, if you could introduce it, say a little bit about the novel, a little taster and talk a little bit about the process that you went through to create that first finished draft of your book.
May Ngo:
Hi, Laura. First of all, thanks for inviting me to talk with you about my novel and the writing process. It was such a pleasure working with you that I'm really happy to be able to kind of reflect back on it after some time.
So yeah, my debut novel is tentatively called The River. It’s a crime fiction novel, and I initially got the idea… I mean it came out of quite difficult circumstances. I went back to Sydney to be with my mother who was dying from cancer. And I stayed until she passed away and stayed for a few months afterwards as well. And it was then, I don't know, I think, like, I found this in my life – grief always releases something, I guess, creative energy. I don't know what it is, but I got this idea to write a crime fiction novel.
And the thing is, I think, I've always been interested in crime fiction, crime drama. You know, I grew up watching The Bill and BBC and British crime dramas and stuff like that. But I always thought that it wasn't for me, because, in terms of creating it, because crime fiction seemed so white, particularly Australian crime fiction.
So, I never, although I love reading, I never saw myself as being able to write that. But for the first time, when I was back in Sydney, I was like, Oh, I can see a character here, and she's um, Asian Australian, and she has to return back to Sydney for family reasons, and she feels, you know, all these kind of… juggling family obligations with wanting to live for herself, and so a lot of, yeah, cultural issues as well, and being an immigrant as well. So this particular character, and then she gets involved, unfortunately, in the corruption of a city, because that's also what I saw when I moved back to Sydney, the rapid urban development – gentrification, it really, I was really amazed by it, and so I thought that this would be a great setting for a crime novel about the corruption of a city and how it's always certain groups of people who have to pay for that. To pay the price for that.
It's around like migrant communities who are affected by an investment scam, including the main character’s parents, and they lose their family home, etc., etc. So that, that was the debut novel that I was thinking of writing, and I enrolled in the in the University of East Anglia MA in Crime Fiction programme. And I was there for, I think, just under a semester before I pulled out.
I think I was a bit disillusioned with the programme. And, you know, I come from… I'm actually, before I started writing fiction, I was an academic in anthropology, so I shouldn't have been surprised, maybe. But I was, in the sense of, you know, when I applied for the programme, I was told that they were seeking diverse writers in the interview that I had, they were seeking to make crime fiction more diverse and everything like that. They said all the right words, and it was great.
But you know, when I when I actually enrolled, I was really the only person of colour student and I reached a point where, you know, on the kind of classroom forum online that we had, we were debating about, you know, whether portraying people of colour as human, you know, is problematic or not. And I was like, oh my gosh, I don't, you know, I don't know if I want to be doing this and spending time on this and also having to explain it, you know, having to explain something to me that we've already, I thought that it had already, in the kind of literary community, really agreed on many things about representation and, yeah, and how problematic it can be.
But anyway, so, yeah, so I made the decision to leave. Well, before I made the decision to leave, I did talk to the course administrators about it, and, you know, they were very understanding. But at the end of the day, they were like, what do you think we should do? What do you think we can do? And it's like, I'm not the one getting paid to run this course like, you know, and you know, I gave them the idea of, why don't you fund a scholarship for people of colour to do this? I'm sure there's so many corporations or institutions that have money it doesn't, you know. For a single person, it's a lot, but for an institution. It's nothing, you know, in the budget, but you know, and I don't think that anything came out of that.
Well, they haven't funded a scholarship for people of colour, and they said that it's really hard to actually find people. That was also the response – people of colour who want to apply, you know, and that's where I thought that well fund a scholarship and then maybe then people will apply. But it's also like the whole – I couldn't believe that we were still talking about this. Of course, it's going to take more effort. It's so interesting how institutions think that they can just keep doing what they're doing but people will come. You know, different people will come. Of course, you’ve got to do things differently, and of course that will take more investment, whether it's time, resources, financial, like, what do you expect? Like, I don't know.
But, like I said, I've come from academia, the social sciences. I really shouldn't have been surprised, because I have some stories. I have some stories from academic institutions? And I think a lot of women of colour have stories that they could tell, but nobody you know, really talks about it.
And now I've left, I just, you know, don't really, don't want anything to do with that. But anyway, so I left the programme because I just like… my time and money is being wasted in this context. It's not for me and the other students – I just could not connect with them at all, and I just, yeah, so I left, and that's when I started looking to work on my own but realizing that I still needed some kind of support, because doing it on your own, I think, is really hard, at least for me, I just didn't know where to start. You know, I had written about 30,000 words at that point, but I just, I got over the beginning, but I couldn't get over the hard middle point, middle part, which everybody says is very challenging. And that's when I found you, Laura, somehow and started working with you on the first to get the first draft finished. And it was really, really a great experience.
And I possibly had to go through, you know, the disillusionment, because I did question myself whether I could do this, whether I should be. Doing it. And also, why bother? Like, if this is the crime fiction community or one part of it, like, what is the point? But? But, yeah, but I think, I think that at the end of the day, it's something I wanted to write for myself, so that's why I kept going.
And I think it's about finding, you know, the right people to, kind of, yeah, to kind of give you that energy boost, and finding the right context. I think that's really helpful in that sense. Yeah.
Laura Joyce:
Thank you so much. That's such a detailed and rich answer, and I really, really appreciate you going through all of that difficulty and sharing that with me. I knew that you'd had a difficult time at UEA, and just for sort of full disclosure, I used to work on that programme, not at the same time as you of course, but I have an awareness of what the programme is like.
I left because it was not a safe context for me to work in, and I did not like the way that it was run. So, I was really pleased to leave and be able to work independently with writers in the way that I thought was supportive and creative and with integrity. And it wasn't always possible to find those things working within institutions. So, like you, May, I'm a recovering academic, I think is what people say now, there are so many of us. It has its own term, and those institutions can be deeply damaging.
But just hearing… it's very painful to hear your experience, but even more so the response to your experience, which is like, can you solve that problem for us? And as you say, you're not the one being paid to run this elite programme. So, it is very distressing to hear that.
And of course, as you say, it's all about putting the resources in – one scholarship could be really, really transformative. It really can't be hard to get rich donors to give, you know, however much it is for one year. And so, I do think the will isn't necessarily there.
And it's, you know, it's just such a testament to your commitment to the book and to your own writing that even after having that experience, and as you say, thinking, why waste your time and money and finite resources like your energy and imagination and spirit on being in a situation that's draining and upsetting, and, you know, in many ways racist. And I really think that finding that you can come back to your work on your own terms, it's something that not everyone is able to do depending on the amount of damage and trauma they experience. So, I sometimes think about how much potential is perhaps unrealized because of these kinds of experiences. So, yeah, hearing about your commitment and your strength is just really, really powerful.
And that's everything that goes into writing a debut novel or a first book or a first draft. It's not just the writing it’s everything else; it's the context. You know, you said, it started with grief. It started with personal grief, and that actually activated your creativity in such, you know, in such a profound way.
And having read your book, I just can't believe how fully formed it felt to me. You know, of course, there's always work to do after a first draft, but it seemed to come out like a book, like a crime novel, and there was just something so right about it. So, knowing that you've got that history of being kind of obsessed with crime stories really made sense to me. But thank you so much for sharing.
May Ngo:
I think it was with you that I learned about the importance of process, but not just that. I think you know, like how you do things, but also that you very much allowed a focus on product, you know. So, when we work together, our goal was to get me to the finish line of the first draft, see. So, it's very much goal orientated, focussed, but not forgetting the process and that that was really the key for me in terms of changing… it was a game changer.
I think that's how I was able to get to it, the dreaded painful first draft, like finishing it, because, yeah, and I've been thinking about this, like writing as process and product.
I've been thinking about it also in terms of pregnancy, because I'm eight months pregnant at the moment, or actually eight and a half months pregnant, so very close to the end. And I was thinking how it's so similar, in the sense of, in my kind of pregnancy journey, there is a product at the end, a human being, a new human being, a baby. And, you know, wanting to get that point of delivering a healthy baby, but the process to get there has been so important in terms of how I view the experience, what kind of context that I'm having, the experience in the support that I'm getting. It totally shapes the experience of the pregnancy.
And, in fact, there might even be, and I think it also affects the product, so to speak, you know, the health of the baby. So, there's this dialectical relationship between process and product that kind of each affects the other. The process has to be appropriate to the product that you're, you know, hoping to achieve. But also, you know, so the product affects the process, but also the process will inevitably affect the final product.
And I was thinking about it in terms of, like masculine and feminine energy, like healthy masculine and feminine energy. So, in my mind, healthy masculine energy is kind of lase- focussed, you know, doesn't allow itself to be distracted by things that don't matter, and getting caught up in distractions and petty things. And is very much, in that sense, wanting to make things happen. You know, wanting to make something important happen. So, for me that's masculine energy.
And then there's kind of more feminine energy, which is allowing things to happen. You know, being and allowing. Pregnancy is very much an experience of both. You know, your body is going through things, doing itself on its own, and I am aware that I have to allow it to happen. But at the same time, you know, in terms of pregnancy and motherhood, there are a lot of voices out there, both society and people, who will kind of tell you how it should be, and then there's a lot of pressures and expectations of what a mother should be and how you should be, and mothering. I can't, I can't tell you how much, I mean, I won't go into it, but it's incredible to me, the pressure that we put on mothers.
I was not aware until I started reading and talking to people and the forums online. So, there is a lot of trying to not get distracted by all of this and focussing on the end goal, which is, you know, the kind of pregnancy you want, and the kind of mother you want to be.
So, there's this always this kind of dance between masculine and feminine energy in pregnancy. But I realized, reflecting on writing the first draft of my novel, there was a strong element of that as well – of the product, and being kind of laser-focussed on wanting to finish a first draft but at the same time, just the process allowing it to happen as well. The moments where you allow it to happen, allow it to kind of arise, really.
And there's moments where I have to be more goal-oriented, other times where I have to, like, let it be, and be with it. And again, it's like a dance, you know, and it changes. But without this there's, at least for me, a tendency to be too kind of masculine-orientated and neglecting the kind of allowing things to be, you know, too much making it happen, because that's how our society functions, productivity, productivity, productivity, and really neglecting this kind of just allowing and being with which I think is really key to creativity, it's a really important aspect of creativity, and that gets kind of suffocated and left out in, at least for me, and I think in our culture as well.
So, I really discovered that working with you on the first draft, this kind of process and product, the relationship between process and product, which I see as, I guess, I now conceptualize as kind of masculine and feminine energies working together. Yeah.
Laura Joyce:
I love that. That's so, yeah, that's just so evocative. I can see it; I can feel it. And I really, I love, you know, we talked all the way through about that thing between process and product, you know, we don't… the point of writing is not just the end product, right? The point is that it's, it's about learning so much about yourself. It's about processing things in your life, alchemizing them.
But it is about a product. You're writing a novel, and you know, you can never lose sight of that. It needs a certain amount of words. It needs a certain amount of chapters. Your characters need to do things, you know.
And one thing that I just recall from our time together is just how much fun it was. I feel like we had a lot of fun, you know, trying out plot points and making characters do things. And there was just so much of that kind of space between, okay, there's planning, and then there's just seeing what comes the serendipity. And a lot of, you know, in the end, I think a lot of the plot points ended up coming through quite intuitively and coming through not from the planning and the masculine energy, but from that just receptive energy that you brought to the process.
And I also really remember the tower as a recurring image that we talked about quite a lot. And when you were talking then about pregnancy, it made me think back to the tower, because pregnancy is quite a tower type moment, thinking about, you know, tarot, because it's such a big change, nothing is going to be the same afterwards as it was before.
And I just really found that that was such a good way to think about your novel, both about that kind of rapidly gentrifying, everything's built up into the sky, there's no space anywhere anymore for anything else. But then also the idea of the tower as a kind of symbol, a watchtower, you know, looking out over the city. There was just so much kind of richness in that image. And thinking about that masculine and feminine made me think back to that kind of tarot symbolism and how we're always trying to kind of balance between the two. So, I love that, May.
May Ngo:
That's the other thing I learned from you, the tarot. It's like for the first time I discovered the tarot. And thanks to you like gifting me with a deck of cards, like the first time I did tarot. And it was really, for myself, and it was really amazing just discovering that. I mean, I just love images and symbolism. They just speak to me on this other level.
And in fact, when you just said the tower, now, I thought of it in relation to, the image came to my mind of me throwing myself off a tower for in terms of giving birth, pregnancy, giving birth, motherhood, and nothing is the same afterwards. And in a way, it's throwing yourself off the tower. You know, that is a way that nothing is ever the same, right? So, I mean, it's a scary image, but I think it is scary, new motherhood. I think it is scary, but it's also something very evocative and powerful.
Laura Joyce:
I think also it doesn't have to be scary necessarily. I mean, I do realize it's maybe not the image you necessarily want to bring with you into the birth, but I think just seeing it as like a powerful transformation. I think that's a very, kind of supportive image, in a way. I've always liked the tower in terms of creativity, because it's almost about that moment in a story where everything changes, and nothing can go back to how it was. And that's almost what the heart of storytelling is really, so I've always loved that image.
May Ngo:
And I think also, like, it's been helpful for me to think about process versus product, because, in a way, product maybe is not the most helpful word, although it's very accurate. For me, product gives purpose, you know, like, there's a reason why I'm doing this. And then the process is, the growth is, is about just growing, you know, learning. Because if it was all just about the product, then I wouldn't care if I learned anything, or if I grew. But when you also have an equal, like, interest, curiosity, awareness of the process, then growth can happen, you know, and, but it's growth with a purpose, because you have this kind of goal, you know, end goal, or whatever.
And I take it back to kind of my experience of the body during pregnancy. So it's like, you know, if I had just, was just focussed on just, you know, having a baby, delivering a healthy baby, but not about how I was going to do that, I think I wouldn't have experienced the growth in my relationship with my body, because a lot of it was trying to through meditation and yoga, mostly, and counselling, therapy, you know, I was able to – not all the time, but most of the time – I was able to bring myself back to my body and awareness of my body and what was happening to it, and it totally transformed my relationship to my body.
I've never felt so liberated before in my body, in the sense of, I just, first of all, I’ve never felt so beautiful, in the sense of, yeah, physically, in the sense of, I didn't give a fuck, like in terms of, my body was not something for other people anymore. It was serving this other purpose that I had chosen, you know, because I had chosen pregnancy. So, it was something that I had chosen. I didn't give a fuck what other people thought about it anymore. It wasn't there for men as object. Its primary purpose wasn't that. I didn't care how fat I was, because I'm supposed to be fat, you know, a big I'm supposed to get bigger. And it was beautiful, because it was carrying this like human life inside me and, you know, and I think that I would have totally missed all of that if I had not focused on the process of, of being with my body as it, allowing it to, happen, for these changes to happen and staying with it, you know, if I was just totally focused on the process of, you know, am I eating enough? You know, eating healthy? Am I doing, you know, the numbers, you know, kind of the medical approach, and trying to control the process, trying to control the end product, instead of just being with.
I was really surprised. I did not expect that to happen, and for me, that's what the purpose of process, focusing on the process is, is – growth. And yeah, and I think I felt the same with writing, definitely, in the writing, and just trying to be with the writing. It really, I think I really discovered things about myself through writing, you know, which had nothing necessary to do with the end product. But at the same time, you know, that end product gave me a goal, a purpose. I may not have, like continued writing, if I didn't have a goal, you know, a purpose, if it didn't feel like there was a purpose to it. So, it, they really worked together for me in both, like writing and pregnancy.
Laura Joyce:
That was just so wonderful to hear. Thank you for sharing that experience, because and earlier, remember you said as well about just making that decision about what mother you want to be, or, you know, what pregnancy you want to have. I think, you know, with the sort of medicalization that can happen, it sometimes feels like there isn't that choice, there isn't that autonomy. And actually, you recovered that autonomy, you know, by doing those body-focussed things, by looking after yourself in the way that actually makes sense to you and not to other people.
And I think that's this, you know, to me, that's a very similar story to the one that you were telling about coming back to the novel after feeling, you know, alienated from it because of the institutional experience that you had, or experiences that you had, and still coming back to it. And I think pregnancy can be very medicalized and institutionalized, but you still found a way to come back to yourself and engage with that process. And I found that really powerful to hear. Thank you.
May Ngo:
Yeah, I think that, I think you're right, like it really did give me an experience of agency, you know, and it's interesting. I think agency can come out… You think agency means being powerful, and I think there is an aspect of that, but it's being both vulnerable and powerful… that's where true agency comes. In my experience of writing and of pregnancy, because I think in both contexts, where you do feel, very vulnerable, and you do feel like, you know, power is taken away from you, but there's also power within you, I think, within the body.
And I think writing is very embodied, and pregnancy, obviously, is very embodied. And it was discovering going back to the body in both cases where I found agency in a sense and discovering that it is both powerful and vulnerable. It's both being powerful and vulnerability. That's where true agency comes from, I think. And pregnancy is really an embodiment of that, I discovered, because you do feel so vulnerable in many ways: emotionally, physically, obviously, socially, but also so powerful. I mean, incredible what the body can do this. It's just incredible to experience it. You know? So that's how I discovered agency through that experience.
Laura Joyce:
I love that. I think that's kind of going back to the balance of the two kinds of energy that you were talking about earlier, as well the sort of masculine and feminine energy. And I think you're so right that there has to be a softness for true agency. Because if it's very hard and rigid, that's inflexible, that's going to break, that's kind of white knuckling rather than being sort of fully present, and I really think that everything you've said about pregnancy, could so easily relate to writing a book, writing your first book, in particular, or your first major project, whatever that is, because you have to go through all of that more or less alone.
But you know there, there are community aspects to it. But you kind of have to work with your own head, with your own self, with your own body. It is very embodied, and, you know, it affects the nervous system very strongly, I think. And some of the work of writing and completing a first significant project is to soften that reactivity in the nervous system, to soothe the body, so it allows you to do the work, almost. And we talked about that a bit. I think when we work together.
May Ngo:
Yes, I think that's, that's totally spot on. It's allowing a, I guess, almost a state of, I don't know if relaxation is the word, but calmness and kind of, like, not defensive, not on guard, so that this vulnerability can happen which makes the writing much richer?
I mean, I don't know, because I found that in that the experience of writing my first draft like that's what I needed for to for the writing to really have some emotional resonance, for it to come up. And, you know, I love reading things that have an emotional undercurrent. Like, that's why I read, and that's also why I write, but to be able to do that. I think there, yeah, there has to, I have to reach a stage where I feel like I can be vulnerable and feeling, I think, the body is the place for me, where there are defences, or I can be truly vulnerable. I feel in my body, and that's where I guess I would like to write from, you know, and like you said, writing is so embodied. I mean, you feel your body as you're writing, like if you sit in a chair too long, I mean, it's very, very much a bodily experience.
Laura Joyce:
I think that's such a beautiful place to end on. And I really, really appreciate all your incredibly insightful conversation today. It’s always such a pleasure to talk to you, May and I wish you so much luck with the birth and everything to come, and with your writing, of course. And if anyone who's listening would like to find out any more about you or your work, is there somewhere they can find you?
May Ngo:
Yes, they can go to my website, which is mayngo.net that's basically where I park all of my writing, all of my projects there. I'm also a writer for hire, so I also write more corporate stuff.
It was such a pleasure and a joy speaking to you, Laura, especially in this special time for me. So, thank you for inviting me here.
Laura Joyce:
Thank you very much.