Meet the 2024 Fellows: Joyce Chen

About Artist Trust Fellowships

Artist Trust Fellowships are merit-based awards of $10,000 providing unrestricted support to practicing professional artists of exceptional talent and ability residing in Washington State. The first Artist Trust Fellowship Awards were selected in 1987, making it our longest-running award program. In 2024, $150,000 was awarded to 15 artists across five Washington State counties.

Our Meet the Fellows series highlights each of the award winners over the year in a series of interviews, talks, blog posts, and social media highlights. To support grants programs like the Artist Trust Fellowships, visit artisttrust.org/donate

Interview with 2024 Artist Trust Fellowship Recipient Joyce Chen

Please introduce yourself and share a little about yourself and your background

The way I typically introduce myself is as a writer, an editor, and a community builder, and in thinking deeply about what binds all three of these identities together, I believe it is a love for story and the relationships that story can engender and reveal. I am very interested in people and what makes us all tick—what are the commonalities that we might share with someone we’re reaching toward across an ocean or through several decades, and how can we make known those connections through our words on the page? So much of my career has been built around these questions. I graduated from the University of Southern California with a BA in journalism and psychology, and worked at various magazines and newspapers for several years before pursuing my MFA in creative nonfiction at The New School. Fittingly, then, I see my work living at the intersection of literary journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir.

My writing has taken me to so many unexpected places and put me in community with so many wonderful people. Through my time working in entertainment journalism, I had the opportunity to attend movie premieres and interview some of my favorite actors, musicians, and filmmakers, as well as shine a light on documentaries and grassroots movements that were moving the needle forward in terms of social awareness and collective change (I still recall fondly my first profile published in print, which was about a college student donating rehabbed running shoes to children in need!).

Now, as the executive director of the Seventh Wave, a literary arts nonprofit, I get to learn from and alongside so many incredibly talented writers, artists, and activists, and to be constantly reaffirmed in the power of creating in community. I believe deeply that no one should write in isolation, and that our art is made better when it is in conversation with others. In all of my artistic pursuits, I always seek to invoke the collective “we”—whether that be my Taiwanese ancestors, my creative mentors, or my co-conspirators in artistic endeavor—because at the end of the day, community is what buoys our art and makes us feel, ultimately, witnessed.

Joyce Chen, The Seventh Wave x Seattle City of Literature salon reading, 2023. Photo: Bretty Rawson.

Your work tends to address the physicality of memory, heritage, and identity. Has your practice impacted how you think about moving through the world as a Taiwanese artist?

This is such a beautifully worded question; it’s actually sparking fresh thought for me as I respond! So thank you for this generous question. In short: yes, and undeniably so. My current project is a memoir-in-essays that examines the friction that arises from living between two cultures with oft-diametrically opposed sets of values—the American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency and the Taiwanese values of family, community, and sacrifice—as experienced through different modes of time perception. For me, everything I understand about the disparate philosophical or intellectual concepts I write about begins with the body. I grew up as a dancer, and so I think as a result of that, I seek stories that are felt as much as they are intellectually understood. I believe that there is a lot of somatic wisdom that we can gleam from our bodies if only we still our minds and pay attention. For me, so much of my writing practice is about learning how to listen and to trust—oftentimes, when I’m feeling stuck on an idea or a passage, I find that getting outside and moving will help to unlock that stuckness; the connection between mind and body is powerful in that way.

Working on this manuscript has helped me to not just recognize that there are instincts inside my body that are borne from my Taiwanese ancestors’ knowledge, but also that who I am and who I continue to become will eventually create a foundation for future generations to build upon. I find this slippage between past, present, and future endlessly fascinating on the page, and it causes me to view my role as a writer off the page as more of a vessel than anything else. My body as the vessel that both carries the stories of my family and my ancestors (their memories, our heritage, my identity) and that then unspools these stories out into the future. The writing is the alchemy that turns these experiences into stories for others to subsume. As a Taiwanese American, claiming my identity has always been a political act. (There’s a big internal friction I feel from knowing that the only country I’ve ever lived in—the US—doesn’t officially recognize my motherland, for instance.) So exploring these concepts through writing and language has helped immensely in helping me to feel somatically grounded in my own lived experiences.

Art is constantly changing and developing. How has your work developed over the last few years?  

The past few years have cracked open such critical revelations for me in my writing. In part, I feel as though I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my own work through opportunities to workshop or chat through the stickier points of the manuscript, both through institutions and more organically, through ad hoc writers’ groups. But perhaps more than that, I think just living life and being more porous to the ways that it continues to shift and change has allowed me to be more honest in my own writing. It’s allowed me to let go of some of the more rigid narratives that I thought could help me make sense of my life/this collectively strange experience of being a daughter of immigrants, of always living between things and never feeling like enough. In the earlier drafts of some of the essays, for instance, I think I was still searching for the stakes: Why was I so hell-bent on telling stories from my childhood, or from my family’s history? Who actually cared about what I was putting down on the page outside of those related to me by blood? It wasn’t until I studied with the brilliant Kiese Laymon in 2018 that I really began to see the necessity of the work I was doing, how it was and will always be, bigger than me. At the time, he told me, with the utmost seriousness: “The world needs your story. Keep going.” And that was honestly what kickstarted my trajectory toward the writing of this book—recognizing that I needed to first and foremost believe in my own story’s worth.

Over the past several years, my understanding of the stakes has become much more clear to me: toward the start of the pandemic, my mother began to lose her memory, and as a result, I began to feel the urgency of telling our family’s story a lot more palpably. I was so aware of the grains of sand fast-falling through the hourglass. My work has moved from tentative forays into my gaps in knowledge to a full-fledged inquiry into everything I don’t know and what I may now never know—family lore and the innermost desires of those closest to me. I think the urgency and the collective impulse behind the creation of this memoir-in-essays has amped up over the past few years, and that’s really allowed me to dig deep and write some things that have genuinely surprised me.

Joyce Chen, Mother, Time, Slant’d, 2019. Artist: Rumi Hara.

Joyce Chen, Post-It Process, Vermont Studio Center, 2023. Photo: Joyce Chen.

What keeps your creative practice moving forward? Why do you create?  

For me, creativity is inextricably linked with curiosity. What drives me to keep writing and creating and ultimately, becoming, is the need to understand why the world is the way it is, and how we can collectively course-correct for the ways that history has harmed those of us for whom it wasn’t built. I am a big believer in asking lots of questions and questioning as a way to complicate what we think we know about the world around us (as well as the worlds within us); anytime I feel my motivation to get back to the page waning, I know it’s time to ask myself a different question, to try to get at the piece from a different angle. Much of my writing also utilizes extended metaphor in the service of meaning-making, which means that my creative practice is fueled by deep listening and observation in my everyday life. Nothing brings me more joy than when I can render visible webs of connection between seemingly disparate events or objects or people—it means I’ve been paying attention.

I’ve always been drawn to the arts ever since I was a child—I loved to draw and paint, would lose hours shaping ceramics or learning new crafts like Chinese knotting or cross-stitching. There was something about the tactile act of creating that always felt so satisfying. So in a way, it’s a bit ironic that my material of choice these days is very two-dimensional—words on a page— but I truly feel that the challenge of this art form is what also keeps me coming back to it: it’s reconstructing whole memories and scenes and characters on the page using such a seemingly rudimentary building block. And because my writing is concerned with the transmutation of a collective history into a legible form, too, a big part of the reason why I create is because I feel the responsibility of making space in the canon for my family’s stories, for my culture’s stories.

As a 2024 Fellowship Recipient, can you please talk about how this award impacts you? 

I can’t overstate how timely this Artist Trust Fellowship has been, and how incredibly honored I am to be one of the 15 artists in Washington state to receive it this year. As a full-time writer and editor, my day-to-day is often dictated by other people’s demands and deadlines; the administrative parts of a freelancer’s life can sometimes overwhelm the actual creative aspects of it. Receiving this generous grant has helped me to take time away from work-work in order to focus almost exclusively on my manuscript and its completion. It’s been just about six years since I first began to see the possibility of these essays as a full collection, and I can feel it in my bones now just how close I am to getting this project over the finish line and into the hands of an agent, then an editor, and then out into the world. (Goodness knows that’s its own long road, too, but at least I can sense I’m on the right path!)

Beyond the financial support that this Fellowship has given me, though, I’ve also received something that is perhaps more valuable in some ways, and more intangible. Getting the call to let me know that I had been awarded the Fellowship earlier this year told me that I was on the right path, and to just keep going. To keep showing up to do the work, and that the labor and the doubt and the insecurities inherent to the process—as they are to any creative process—are all signposts along this creative path, but not all there is to the journey.

How can Artist Trust continue to support artists across Washington State? 

Artist Trust is a true beacon in what can feel like a vast and tempestuous sea. Unrestricted financial support is a lifeline for so many artists (myself included), because it recognizes that artists are full humans who often have to juggle many different roles and responsibilities in order to create. It also acknowledges that inequities like housing insecurity, health issues, and financial instability can put many talented artists at a disadvantage before even getting to the point of having a project to pitch or a specific piece they might want to work on. Offering opportunities for artists to connect across disciplines and learn from one another’s art forms is one way I believe Artist Trust can really help to bolster Washington State’s art scene in general; there is so much we can and do learn from those who work in mediums so different from our own. Another way is by continuing to host sessions that help to demystify the application process for applying to large scale grants such as this one, as Artist Trust already does so well—pushing for more accessibility and casting the widest net possible to help uplift the voices and the minds who could really use that extra boost. I’m so appreciative of how Artist Trust has really shown up for me and my work, and I wish this kind of support for all artists seeking to tell their stories and make meaning of this life.