as a novelist.

Then Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith processes our times with poetry.

Plus, it's Nixon in Gish Jen's China.

It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ Welcome to this special poetry and prose edition of the show.

We're going into the writers' room, revisiting conversations we've had with the novelists and poets whose words give us new ways to see the world.

First up, you might have thought John Waters has done it all-- films, theater, fine art, not to mention testing the limits of filth.

But he's never written a novel until now.

It's called Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, and it focuses on Marsha Sprinkle, a woman who loves to lie and who also loves to prowl airports stealing luggage.

John Waters, welcome back to the show.

>> Thank you, thanks for having me.

>> BOWEN: For your first novel, Liarmouth.

>> Yeah, first novel.

>> BOWEN: Is it all transferable skills after all the screenplays you've written, the memoirs, everything else?

>> Kind of it is, because you're just telling another story.

Same way that I do with my spoken-word Christmas show, or in any of my books-- I've only written my own movies.

I never wrote anybody...

I never did a movie I didn't write.

So the process is the same.

It's, you can get into much more detail, much more character development.

You can be crazier and not have to worry, how much is this gonna cost?

How long is going to take to shoot that?

How am I going to get permission to shoot there?

So that is great, to not have to worry about that.

>> BOWEN: Well, how do you describe this novel?

Especially since you, you can write all about these airports.

You don't have to buy all the licensing fees for airports.

>> Yeah.

>> BOWEN: Location fees.

>> I describe it as a feel-bad romance, but I mean that as a joke, because I think, I hope I write to make people feel good about themselves, because I try to make them be surprised and laugh.

The first person I'm trying to make laugh is myself when I'm writing, and when I do, I know that the joke really worked.

And then you go through it a million times.

I mean, rewriting is when it gets better and better each time, even though the first draft is the hardest to do.

And you just keep going.

And I just read it at the end and think, "Who wrote this?"

It's like another person wrote it, even.

I even forget parts.

>> BOWEN: Well, I'll ask the question that everybody asks every writer.

You're writing what you know, perhaps.

How autobiographical is it?

>> Well, it's not at all autobiographical.

I mean, what I know, it's about trampoline fanatics.

I knew nothing about trampoline fanatics.

But there is such a thing as a movement, the people that have to bounce all the time.

Now, I really exaggerated it.

I know enough about airports.

I'm in them practically every day.

I did know somebody that stole a suitcase in an airport, and I do know someone that stole the flight attendant's pocketbook.

That inspired me.

>> BOWEN: (laughs) >> Not to do it!

But since I was in airports the whole time I'm writing it, I'm looking and thinking, there are so many crimes in this book that take place in airports.

It will make you watch your stuff, definitely.

>> BOWEN: It already has, yeah!

I'm thinking, move the wallet to the front.

>> Yeah.

>> BOWEN: Well, it makes me wonder, as I'm hearing you, you've filed away all of these things over the years.

What is it, how do you describe your brain?

All of the ideas, the nuggets that just sit there?

>> I'm a writer, so I'm nosey-- I'm always asking questions.

I'm always eavesdropping.

I'm always watching people.

You're never not at work if you're a writer.

>> BOWEN: Well, if you're observing everybody for as long as you have, are there fundamentals you come to about who we are as human beings?

>> Well, the person that always are the, are the heroes of my books and movies are people that don't judge other people, because they don't know the back story.

And the back story is what I like to tell.

I don't think anyone's born bad.

I think things happen to people and it's not fair.

I don't believe in karma.

I was born very lucky.

My parents made me feel safe.

I'm really glad my parents are dead for one reason.

They don't have to read this book.

>> BOWEN (laughs): Do you really believe that?

>> Yes, they would be horrified by this book.

This one more than anything I've ever done, probably, they would be horrified.

They paid for Pink Flamingos and they never saw it.

>> This beautiful mobile home you see before you is the current hideout of the notorious beauty Divine, the filthiest person alive!

>> They saw a lot of my movies later.

And they were really proud.

They were so happy when Hairspray finally came out.

They could finally... >> BOWEN: (laughs) >> ...say they loved it without being a liar.

>> BOWEN: Well, so I was wondering about that, because I read that you were... You set limits for yourself in this book.

So what's your system of checks and balances?

>> Well, my limits in this was about political correctness today.

This book makes fun of that by going overboard in the opposite direction, of saying that people that are addicted to trampolines are a minority that is discriminated against.

>> BOWEN: (chuckles) >> And being really serious about that in the book, and that's what satire is, I think, when you make fun of the rules but to make people laugh, not preach at them.

>> BOWEN: Well, we've been having this conversation, especially in the heightened arena of political correctness, about the death of comedy.

Are you worried at all about the vitality of comedy?

>> No, I think it's maybe... Well, we'll see.

>> BOWEN: (laughs) >> What's, how this book is received-- you don't know.

Because it definitely makes fun of it.

But I believe I am politically correct.

I just make fun of myself-- that's what they don't do.

The one thing missing in this trigger warning crowd is, they never make fun of themselves.

I don't think racism's funny, I don't think transphobia is funny, but it is funny to be so earnest all the time.

You have to make fun of yourself.

Then you can use political stuff for ammunition against your enemy, but making fun of yourself first gets people to listen.

>> BOWEN: So it's so interesting about Pink Flamingos, because it would be my contention that a young filmmaker today couldn't make that film.

>> Probably not, probably not.

>> BOWEN: And yet...

But yet we're in a society where it just lands as an institution.

>> Maybe because it's in a time capsule of something, you know, that it was made 50 years ago.

I don't know that... A kid could come up today with, and make a movie that is...

It would have to just confuse political correctness.

It would throw everybody off.

They wouldn't know how to react to it from either side.

That's what will be the next hit that lasts.

Because the old-time censorships, they hated sex, you couldn't...

They lost-- I mean, basically, you can... On television there's things you went to jail for in the '50s.

They gave up on me, they don't try to stop me.

They figured I'm a lost cause, really.

I don't get much right-wing censorship.

The best thing that could happen with this book is that the governor of Florida banned it in schools.

That would be the best possible thing that could happen.

They're not that dumb to do that, because they know that.

>> BOWEN: Where does age come into play for you and the fact that you get elevated after a while?

>> Well, I love that young people are in my audience.

That means it still works.

It didn't say, like, "Oh, that's old hat, I've seen that."

They haven't seen it.

But age, you know, I'm not middle-aged.

I'm 72-- 76!

I'm not going to be 152 years old.

So old chickens make good soup.

>> BOWEN: Well, finally, I just want to ask, do you just have the constitution that you can withstand when you had the critics over the years who said you were just so vile, the work was vile, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?

>> Yeah, but what was good then, it was a different world.

When they said that, the critics were so-called "straight," they used to call them-- that didn't mean heterosexual.

It meant they didn't smoke pot or they weren't hippies.

So they were so square that they gave me... All my early career was based on negative reviews.

The whole ads for Pink Flamingos were "the worst movie ever."

"It'll make you sick."

My favorite was, like, "A septic tank explosion.

It has to be seen to be believed."

So all those reviews helped.

Critics are way too smart to do that today.

They could help then-- there was a cultural war between two groups of people going on.

Today, there isn't that, when everything is decided in one second because of the phones and internet and everything.

So word of mouth happens in one second.

That's why every movie, the tail credits when you're walking out is upbeat, because they know that's when people are already texting, "Hated it!"

So I just kept going because I had an audience.

They were angry and had a good sense of humor, and that's still my audience.

And they hate everybody in the world except each other.

>> BOWEN (laughs): Well, John Waters, always a pleasure to be with you, thank you.

>> Thank you for having me.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith has released a career-spanning volume of poems, which also includes some of her latest works.

We talked about her collection, titled Such Color, earlier this year.

But first, here she is reading an excerpt from her poem "My God, It's Full of Stars."

>> When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said they operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed and papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.

He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks, His eyes exhausted and pink.

These were the Reagan years, When we lived with our finger on the button and struggled to view our enemies as children.

>> BOWEN: Tracy K. Smith, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Oh, thank you.

>> BOWEN: Well, we just heard from some of your poem, "My God, It's Full of Stars."

Tell me about that piece.

>> That was a poem that I wrote in 2009.

It was part of a project of poems that were thinking about science fiction as a device for thinking about America in the present tense-- you know, distance between people, disconnection.

I was asking the question, "If we don't change, where will we be in, you know, some unforeseeable future?"

And the poem starts out thinking in what I imagine are even larger terms than at, because as I was working on this body of sci-fi poems, my father became ill and passed away.

And suddenly the future got really big to me and it became the afterlife.

And I was trying to come up with a satisfying version of where my father was, what the meaning or the function of the afterlife was.

And I think, of course, I was also looking for inklings about what this life might be about >> BOWEN: So there's writing in that time.

What is it to write in this time, which is such a fraught time?

>> Well, it's really funny to me that Life on Mars is a book that was really trying to pitch itself... its, its imagination out, you know, out far in time in perspective or dimensions.

And the other poems that I've written since that book have really turned toward history and the earth, the planet, you know, the everyday textures and frictions that we move through and create.

In a way, history feels like another distancing device that allows me to grapple with the present.

It also feels eerily useful because so much of the tension and so much of the conflict that I feel we as Americans are caught up in has to do with terms of the past that we have refused to address properly.

Questions that are rooted, as I see them, in racism or racial difference, and the conundrum of freedom and equality in a nation that is also culpable of, you know, this terrible, dehumanizing institution that was slavery.

>> BOWEN: How difficult is it for you to write about these issues?

Or perhaps I'm also hearing that it's somewhat cathartic to try to process them through history and understand these times.

>> Yeah, I wonder if catharsis is what I would use.

I feel my poems, even my happy poems, begin from a feeling of imbalance or unrest.

So even a love poem for me begins with, "This is so powerful.

How can I get a grip on it?"

And I'm also asking language and association and whatever else art is drawing upon to help me get something that could feel like revelation.

You know, something that could show me it's not just other people.

You, too, need to shift in some way if you want to help make things better.

>> BOWEN: How do you find that?

I'm also mindful of asking you that because I saw a New York Times piece with you where you went through your schedule, you logged your schedule for the New York Times.

>> Oh, gosh.

>> BOWEN: And I thought, how does she have any time to do anything, let alone be an astonishing poet?

>> Time is wild, right?

(both laugh) And lately it feels so very fast.

But as we become more willing to pile and heap things in our schedules, I think we also become a little bit more efficient, or at least that's my, my hope.

So I'm trying to work on making art, even if it's just building questions or reading or dealing with material that can help me grow as a, as a person.

>> BOWEN: Well, I'm always so interested in process, and I wonder where that balance comes in.

Does it just build and build and build until you have to sit down?

>> Well, it's different in different times.

Sometimes, I mean, I look back sometimes on my phone and I see that I have actually the first drafts of many of the poems I've written were written in the Notes section, maybe while I was on an airplane or something like that.

Or sometimes an idea will wake me up in the middle of the night.

And I know now that if I don't write it down, it will go to somebody else.

(Bowen chuckles) But then there are periods built into my life as an academic where I have luxury of time-- you know, a sabbatical every, every few years.

And those are full days of feeling like I'm just in the space and writing.

When you're writing that much, other poems almost feel called by the ones you've just finished, they come in on the wake.

And that's really exhilarating.

>> BOWEN: You mentioned something just a moment ago, which I think plays off what you just said, which is if, "I don't write down "those thoughts I have on the plane or at night, it'll go to somebody else."

(Smith chuckles) What do you mean?

>> Well, I, you know, I have no proof of this, but I imagine that there are there are trends, waves, instincts that many of us have, many of us are, are nudged by, and, you know... Well, here's an example.

I wrote a poem called "Declaration," which is an erasure of the Declaration of Independence.

And when it was published, I got an email from my friend Morgan Parker, who is a poet, and the email said, "You will not believe I wrote a poem "that's very, very similar to your poem based on the same text.

Here it is."

You know, those were poems that were written during a time when we were witnessing a large number of, you know, violent acts committed against unarmed Black citizens.

But I feel like that, that awareness, I want to believe there's a voice or a wind or a, I don't know, a tug that is making certain things more perceptible.

>> BOWEN: We asked if you would read us another of your poems to lead us out of the segment.

What have you chosen?

And, again, why?

>> Well, this next poem is called "Mothership."

And I wrote a lot of poems in 2020 sitting in my backyard feeling, you know, the weight of the ages-- I think many of us did in different ways-- and asking for help and courage and clarity.

And that became a meditative practice for me, and in some ways I felt like there was something that was speaking back to me.

And I remember one day sitting out there, I was thinking about a friend who had lost her mother, and my mother's gone.

You know, 2020 was a year when I needed her.

And so I was wondering, maybe my mother and Aisha's mother know each other now, and if they can help us, that's great.

They understand what we can't yet fully understand.

And that gave me a little bit of, like, hope.

And then I said, "Oh, but wait, "what if it's true that everyone's mother who's gone "sits at a vantage point to the rest of the world that allows them to get what we can't get?"

This poem was a way of saying, "Oh, okay, what do they see?

Maybe it's very simple."

>> BOWEN: Well, Tracy K. Smith, thank you so much for being with us.

The book is Such Color.

We appreciate it.

>> Oh, thank you.

You cannot see the mothership in space, It and she being made of the same thing.

All our mothers hover there in the ceaseless blue-black, watching it ripple and dim to the prized pale blue in which we spin-- we who are Black, and you, too.

Our mothers know each other there, fully and finally.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Next, writer Gish Jen.

She has captured the characteristics and conflicts of clashing cultures in essays, short stories, and novels.

She does it again, and with her trademark humor, in her book of short stories called Thank You, Mr. Nixon.

The collection offers a series of fictional tales spanning the 50 years since the opening of China, and coincides with Jen's own visits to the country.

Gish Jen, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Oh, my pleasure.

>> BOWEN: So tell me, what was germinating, what, what made you look at the span of time that we see in your book?

>> Well, you know, of course, it just so happens, very luckily for me, that I started writing right after the opening of China, and that's just completely coincidental.

So the first time I went to China was 1979 with my family.

Like many Chinese fam..., you know, Chinese immigrant families, were dying to go back, meet my mother's family and so on.

And so I went in '79, I went back in '81 to teach coal miners English in Shandong province.

And then I came back that summer, and that very fall, I started my MFA.

So, so all those impressions of China, and, you know, and all that grappling with what this all meant, that was all happening to me in real time as I was learning to write, you know?

And, and, of course, I've continued to write all these years.

And then I sat down during COVID, and I'm looking and I'm thinking, "You know, I should really do a collection."

And then all of a sudden, I realize, like, "Oh my God," and that, you know, kind of... We're coming up on the 50th anniversary of Nixon's first visit.

And suddenly I realized that I had had... You know, I had, I had kind of a record.

>> BOWEN: Well, what was it to chart that and to... To put it all together?

And you realize, as you're reading through, how much has happened, and obviously, we know from history how much has happened, but what it feels like what's happened.

>> Yeah, well, you know, of course, I was just writing the stories, and that's my job, to sort of record how people are feeling and what families are like.

And I'm writing during COVID.

COVID is going on and I'm realizing that I'm going to have to write a COVID story.

You know, that, you know, where all this stuff comes together.

>> BOWEN: It's interesting you say you have to write a COVID story, because I was struck by that, too, and wondering, what is it like to have to write in this time?

Something I think a lot of us just want to... You can watch some television shows and film and, where it never happened, but you chose to write about it.

>> In this case, you know, I, I myself was just aware of this very special pressures on families as they were kind of, you know, stuck in the apartment, you know, an apartment together or a house together.

And I'm very aware of the way all kinds of things are popping out, you know?

And as a, as a human, of course, I'm as dismayed as anybody.

But as a writer, I'm kind of excited.

(both laughing) Well, because we're always looking, you know, we're looking for that arc, or we're looking for something to pop out, you know, something which was latent, we want it to come to the surface.

And COVID, it turns out, was, you know, just the kind of accelerant, you know, that a, that a writer really lives for, one might say.

>> BOWEN: Well, what is it like to write at this time, when so many people are paying attention to Asian Americans in this country, and the violence, and how, how long protection's eyes were turned away from that, from that community?

>> Yeah, well, you know, that's a good question, too.

I mean, I think that, you know, when I sit down, I don't sit down to address any social problem.

But when I stand up, I'm aware that actually, you know, my work, you know, has a place in this whole picture.

And when I looked at this, this collection, I could see that, you know, just at a time when, when people do, you know, they are turning to stereotype and whatever, I can sort of say, maybe, "Read my book."

There's a lot of different kinds of Asian Americans in this book, you know.

(laughing) And they have their good points and their bad points.

I mean, but, you know, but they're, they're very human.

And also, you know, I write a lot about cultural difference.

And that's something that, you know, I think that, in a general kind of way, mainstream Americans are very uncomfortable with cultural difference, but I've, I've written a lot about it, I've thought a lot about it, and it is simply a fact of life.

And so, you know, to me, when I look at all the problems, I do feel like our culture will be better served if we had a better understanding of our culture and other people.

Like, what is that?

What is culture?

You know, why do we have it?

Why does it matter so much to us?

Why does it bother us?

And for me, I feel like, "Well, all right, here's my book; this is my contribution."

>> BOWEN: I'm wondering what the impact of your teaching in China over the years has had on your writing.

For people who might not know your biography, you weren't born in China, so it's a place that you visited.

>> Yes.

>> BOWEN: So, what is the influence?

What's the impact?

What have you drawn there?

>> I have Chinese parents, Chinese American parents, meaning they were born in China.

My parents actually came from, really, kind of 19th-century China.

Like, everybody, even Chinese would say, "Oh, they're very Chinese."

And, like, you know, for me... And that had a huge influence on, on the way I grew up and what I understood and what I, the way I thought.

I think I was looking for a part of myself.

You know, that, you know, every time I would go, I would understand a little bit more.

And so, and, you know, so I guess it's just sort of, say, for me, the opening of China, among other things, was a chance to grapple, you know, with, with my, with my own heritage.

I'm not just talking about the food, do you know what I mean?

It's a lot more than dumplings.

It's a lot more than dumplings.

(Bowen laughs) >> BOWEN: I love to go into people's process, and I was fascinated to learn about how you looked at the economy in your own writing.

Which is, I think you've described it as, you know, it could be considered a very Chinese style of writing, to have such economy.

To what do you attribute that?

>> This is a great example of, of a cultural persistence.

I learned a certain narrative style from my parents, do you know what I mean?

And I learned to, to value certain things, like non-verbal, non-verbal communication.

So if you think about Chinese landscape paintings, I'm sure you've seen, like, it's a very kind of resonant blankness.

And they really prize that.

You know, but the resonance-- it's not just blank, it's resonant, right?

And there's something about that, you know, which is so...

There's a quality about that, that silence or that blankness, which is so resonant, which, you know, it so speaks to so much that we feel which is ineffable and, you know, and, and beyond words.

And I don't want to say everything.

I want to say enough.

But I, but, you know, I want the reader to leave with the feeling that, you know what?

We cannot know everything about these people's lives.

We cannot know everything about what history has done to us, what it means to us.

And that's okay.

Not only is it okay... Yeah, it's part, it's what I'm trying to express as a writer and as a human.

>> BOWEN: Well, I want to end on, on a humorous note, which is your humor, and especially given how much you talked about your family... First of all, the first story in Thank You, Mr. Nixon, this girl writing from heaven to President Nixon in hell, in his-- is it pod?

Is that what... His pool in hell?

>> He's in a pit.

>> BOWEN: A pit.

>> In a pit, because it's hell.

>> BOWEN: In his pit.

>> The ninth ring.

>> BOWEN: It's hilarious.

Did you grow up... Did you come up from a funny family?

It's... Now I'm doing the thing you're not supposed to do, asking a serious question about humor, but... >> It was... You know, I have to say that I think it's genetic, in my case.

My father just has a great sense of humor.

And don't get me wrong, I think also growing up with somebody like that, then it is developed, right?

But I think, I think I have my father's sense of humor.

I can see it in my son, as well.

And in particular, my father was always very amused by incongruity.

You know, when things are just, like, you know, one person is in one reality and the other person is in another reality, like... And that particular kind of humor is extremely helpful for an immigrant, especially, you know?

Because you are often confronted with one person in this reality and this person, you know... (chuckles) >> BOWEN: Is it a mechanism for you?

>> I don't think so.

You know what I think?

I think it really is just...

It's like a fil...

It's like the...

It's just a way of seeing things.

And, frankly, the world is funny, you know?

Well, because it's funny, because, in fact, we construct our reality.

But then we all believe in our own construction.

And because we do that, the potential for something to be funny is always there.

Right?

Right?

It's always, it's always there.

We take ourselves way too seriously.

>> BOWEN: Well, Gish Jen, it has been fabulous to be with you.

Thank you so much.

>> Oh, my pleasure.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this special edition of Open Studio.

I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, @OpenStudioGBH.

I'm @TheJaredBowen.

>> "Ode to Joy."

O friend, my heart has tired Of such darkness.

Now it vies for joy.

Joy, bright God-spark born of Ever Daughter of fresh paradise-- Where you walked once now walk rancor, Greed, suspicion, anger, fright.

Joy, the breeze off all that's holy, Pure with terror, wild as flame.