In Retrospect: An Interview with Marianne Chan, Guest Judge for 2025 Misfits Prize
Welcome to “In Retrospect,” a new interview series which asks renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From their early writing to their most recent collection, we’re looking to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped their body of work. Our guest judge for the 2025 Misfits Prize, Marianne Chan, takes us behind the scenes of her collections All Heathens and Leaving Biddle City.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Marianne Chan: I wrote tons of rhymed poems as a child for fun, but the poem that felt most adult and most relevant to my current work was one I wrote in Diane Wakoski’s poetry workshop in undergrad at Michigan State University. The poem featured a speaker who had a phantom limb that was an archipelago. What I appreciated most about the poem was that I was practicing what Diane Wakoski called “personal mythology,” taking my own memories and experiences and sublimating them into striking images and narratives that tell a kind of emotional truth. That’s what I still do today in my poems.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection of poetry spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
MC: My first collection All Heathens thinks a bit about Magellan and circumnavigation, so I love this question about a poem that my first collection spins around. That poem for me would be “Elegy for Your Master,” which is one that I wrote for Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s slave, who may have been the first person to circumnavigate the world (look it up!). At every reading, I would read this poem, because I loved invoking Enrique into that space and I felt that it helped me set up the themes I explored in that book.
FP: What lessons did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you applied to the process of creating your second collection?
MC: Every poem you write helps you write your next one, so I think in general my process of writing poems for All Heathens helped me write the poems I wrote for Leaving Biddle City. That said, my processes for writing my two books were so different from one another, it almost felt as though I was starting over and was working on another debut collection. The process of getting poems together for All Heathens involved me looking at all the poems I’d written over the course of my life and finding the themes running through the poems that could turn the poems into a book. Once I discovered what the poems were saying to one another, I wrote a bit more to find ways to hold the collection together. In other words, the process was like sculpting. The clay was already there; I just had to shape it and add a few touches. On the other hand, Leaving Biddle City was a concept from the beginning. I wanted to write about growing up in Michigan and mythicize that experience, and also write about what it was like to grow up as an Asian person in a mostly white town. Instead of writing individual poems and then, once those poems have accumulated, finding ways that they work together, for Leaving Biddle City, I worked on poems specifically for this project. And the book created its own shape as the poems were written.
FP: Tell us about your latest published collection of poetry. Could you briefly map out its evolution from a starting point to the final draft?
MC: Leaving Biddle City is a coming-of-age story. It’s a book about growing up feeling like an outsider in a small town. It’s about family and sibling relationships and the way we create jokes and stories to grapple with difficult past experiences. It contemplates memory and forgetting, and it features snowmen and lakes and the suburbs and musicals. The book is mostly made up of prose poems, which I love, because I always thought of prose poems as a kind of literary interloper. It’s a poem dressed up in the disguise of prose, a kind of Misfit form on its own.
I started writing this collection after I read my friend Geoff Bouvier’s Living Room. He has a poem in this collection called “Sestina,” which is a prose sestina, and I wanted to mess around with using poetic form inside a prose block. The first poem I wrote for this collection is called “Winter Flowers in Biddle City,” which is a prose pantoum. I realized that I wanted to write more poems about my hometown, so I continued in this way for a while, writing hundreds of poems, and only a few ended up in the collection.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
MC: My work often examines place and history and memory and how these elements shape us. From my earliest poems to my most recent ones, my family members always seem to show up. They’re my muse in a way.
FP: Lastly, could you tell us a little about what the theme of the Misfits Prize means to you? Where does that theme appear amongst your own poems?
MC: My second book Leaving Biddle City is all about being a misfit. I never used the word “misfit” before, but that’s exactly what it’s about. It’s about not quite belonging. It’s also about finding moments of belonging, despite the challenges and hurt that comes with being a racial other in a mostly white space. So, I love the idea of the Misfit prize, and also the idea that poems can be Misfits in the context of one’s larger body of work.
