Fairytales are no longer for the young but maybe for the young at heart. Associate Professor of Literature, Creative Writing, Lily Hoàng’s new novel and seventh work of prose, A Knock at the Door, is a collection of fairytales riddled with knock-knock jokes bringing whimsical wonder back to an adult audience. Hoàng is known for her experimental fiction, non-fiction, flash prose, and especially fairy tales.
Hoàng’s new novel was published under the Texas Review Press’s Innovative Prose series which highlights new and established writers who write experimental works. The Texas Review Press describes A Knock at the Door, “peeps through a tiny, distorted keyhole, and on the other side, fairy tales wait—with patience, with malice, with magic.” In this collection of tales, Hoàng creates new, silly fairytales while also exploring serious themes of gender inequality. Hoàng also implements Vietnamese culture in this collection of short stories.
On Jan. 21, The Triton interviewed Hoàng and on her inspiration and the process behind A Knock at the Door.
The Triton: Fairytales have always been your thing. Such as in your novel Bestiary you morph fairytales into reality. What’s the appeal of fairytales for you?
Hoàng: I think I had a standard answer for years, which was that fairy tales are a common cultural reference. I was really interested in that and then looking at kind of the original fairy tales and how they’ve been Disney-fied. So this move from something that is really violent and bawdy to something that’s sanitized and teaches a moral. I was interested in that as a trajectory in development. I gave that answer for years. But then I remembered that in fact, I actually didn’t know any American fairy tales when I was a kid. I probably didn’t know American fairy tales until I entered elementary school but I was really obsessed with these Chinese martial art sagas that were dubbed into Vietnamese. In them, there are people who fly and break laws of reality. I think my interest in fairy tales begins there. It was my way of understanding a world that was very different from my own and it gave me imagination and it also gave me language.
The Triton: So why A Knock at the Door? What was the inspiration for this one?
Hoàng: When I wrote A Bestiary that was my first collection of essays. I’m primarily a fiction writer. I wrote A Bestiary kind of out of necessity. [I was] trying to process my sister’s death and there was just like a lot of sadness that was surrounding me and nonfiction was the correct form for that story. And so along the way, every time I write a book, no matter what book it is, if I’m working in the long form, I will write something in the long form, and then at the same time, concurrently I will write something that is very, very short, but in the opposite genre. So if I’m writing a novel, I’ll try to write flash essays or book reviews or something and the reason why I do this is that it gives me something else to do that is still creative to occupy my brain while like my passive brain works out the problem. Writing something that is really small doesn’t take a lot of time. You can get it done and in that time my brain has worked out whatever problem it is that I couldn’t figure out before. And so then I can return to that one. So while I was writing A Bestiary I have another collection of essays that I wrote after that, that is not yet published. But while I was writing those two collections, I was writing these little fairy tales, just for fun. Again, as I look through the collection of my writings, I noticed that they all contained this knock at the door. And so that’s how A Knock at the Door happened. By coincidence, there was one kind of theme in the motif that just appeared over and over again.
The Triton: I did want to talk about some of the settings. I thought it was interesting that you placed one of the stories for example in Copenhagen and another one in Slovakia. Was there any significance to those locations? I guess you could put a fairy tale anywhere, but is there any significance to these locations?
Hoàng: The only significance to me is because I was in that location when I wrote the fairy tale. I was traveling through Europe and that’s where I placed the fairy tale. Copenhagen in particular, because Hans Christian Andersen is from there. I would generally shy away from putting a city like that in a fairy tale, but it was just because that’s where I was when I wrote it. And so I wanted to give it a little something.
The Triton: Another thing I wanted to get into was the blend of modernity with fairy tales. There’s a quote in the chapter of The Witch at Blackbird Pond. You said, “Riddle me this one: What the fuck is wrong with being a witch? She has thousands of Internet friends; they wish her happy birthday, like they understand the language of her damage.” I wanted to know, what led you to blend modernity with fairy tales?
Hoàng: I think that’s something that I’ve been doing for a while. I think that fairytales have a timeless quality to them and many of these do exist in this timelessness where it could be now or it could be a time that is pre-technology. But I really like these moments where I disrupt the expectation that is, set in this fairy tale. I want the fairy tale to move through time and drop you at various parts, various places, and time zones.
The Triton: Circling back to the knock-knock jokes, I noticed at least as a reader, some of the knock-knock jokes were an introduction to the next piece. I also wanted to know why the choice to make some of the “Knock Knock jokes” in Vietnamese.
Hoàng: I felt like there was an imbalance of Western and European representation. I wanted to put them in there because when I was a child, if I heard a knock- knock joke, it was not in English. It would have been in Vietnamese. Are these the knock-knock jokes? Probably not. But I think it speaks to at least for me that bilinguality and the cultural kind of weaving that I had as a child and and as an adult. The jokes themselves, I did try to have some relationship between the actual jokes and the pieces around them. But it didn’t always work. Also, the knock-knock jokes were a very late addition to the text. A Joke of Sorts, which is a knock, knock joke, there’s no punchline. That one was the original. We had gone through edits of it and they were about to send it to the printers and I said, “Oh my goodness! I know what it’s missing – knock, knock jokes!” And I thought my editor was going to totally freak out and say, “No.” um, But, I was very, very lucky. My editor was amazing and was like, “Oh, no, Lily! You’re right. This is what it needs.”
The Triton: Would you say the knock-knock jokes were formulaic?
Hoàng: Ordinarily, there would be like an order and a fashion, and I would follow some kind of formula. With all of my books, except this one, form is very, very important. So my first book Parabola is a literal parabola. It starts on Chapter 10, goes down to Chapter 0, and then goes back up to 10 and it folds over on itself. And the two sides talk to each other. My second book Changing is based on the Chinese I Ching. With A Bestiary, it’s the zodiac animals. But, with this one, there was not really an order. I was just writing jokes. I mean, many of these are just refashioned jokes that are out in the world. Most of these I did not not come up with myself.
The Triton: When reading Four of Swords, I’m assuming that it was more of a personal essay because of the mention of your close friend, Jackie Wang. I wanted to know if you could tell me more about that essay. Where it’s coming from and why Four of Swords?
Hoàng: That is the only essay in the book. The rest of the book is fiction, and I think that is also something that I like to do. I’m going to call this a collection of short stories and then I’m gonna put an essay in the middle of it and I’m going to say this is also fiction, or I’m gonna call this also a short story. Similarly with A Bestiary, it’s a collection of essays, and then I put fairy tales in the middle of it, and I tell you the reader, ‘I’m calling all of this an essay and you have to reshift your expectations on what form and what genre are. When I wrote Four of Swords in this book, it looked completely different than everything else. There’s footnotes [and] there’s a dramatis persona that shifts around. My friend Selah, who is in the essay drew the four of swords I think like two or three times and it was a card that just kept on coming up again and again. I don’t know very much about tarot. I would say that much of this I learned while I was writing. But there was a knock at the door in this essay, and so I just put it in. Also, this one is mythology, and both are forms of magic, but like very different forms of magic, and with very different expectations on what they are. To put them in the same book, I mostly just want the reader to question their expectations for [A Knock at the Door] and what they do with it.
The Triton: At the end of this essay, you have the dramatis personae (a list of main characters in a dramatic work). This felt at least to me almost like an end-credit scene. Almost like you’re telling us who played what role in your life, right?
Hoàng: The dramatis personae is a nod to all of the Greek mythology that’s in here. So this is the thing that would be at the very beginning of a play. It would give you characters, the character list. Here is every character that appears in the essay and the four to six different versions of them. The way that it is organized tells you something about how I want you to read these characters.. So, let’s say, Andrew matters to person one. We have female characters who are friends, men who are lovers, and then people who are real, and then people who are mythological, and then people who are religious. Then the second one, it’s a different ordering, and the third one, again, it just does something slightly different on how I want you to read these characters. Depending on how its read, it can alter the way that the text itself is read.
The Triton: I noticed topics on gender and gender division, particularly with the Little Matchstick Boy versus the Little Matchstick Girl. The little matchstick boy is praised for what he does. Then, the little matchstick girl is left basically with nothing. So I wanted to know what led to the story.
Hoàng: I love the Little Matchstick Girl as a fairy tale and this is not what I hope for. It is the way society works. I’m hoping that in this way because I’m pointing to it, that it is challenged. He grows up to be a knight who saves distressed damsels all day long, whereas the girl is staked and burned. I think it would be easier for us to say, “Oh, well, that was back in the day.” But I think we both know that this is not true, and this is still very much the way of gender and the world is today.
The Triton: I also noticed you challenging that [narrative] in the Devil’s Heavy Briefcase. Traditionally, in fairy tales with a father figure, the father figure would end up being the victor but it ended up being the mother and the daughter. So, would you say that you were also trying to challenge gender norms?
Hoàng: Totally. I love fairy tales and I love reading them, I love writing them, but the archetypes and the gender expectations are always frustrating. And so if I get to write my own fairy tale, then I get to do whatever I want with it.
The Triton: Did anything new come up for you as a writer?
Hoàng: I wrote this book a long time ago, and I wrote it over a pretty long period of time. The first pieces in here, I probably wrote before I started A Bestiary. The Four of Swords went through a pretty radical revision for this book. Whereas the rest of the stories, the editor did very, very little, just offered line edits. With Four of Swords, the footnotes weren’t there originally. I’ve also never done the thing with the dramatis persona. That was also a new and a different way of thinking about it. It worked for the better, honestly. I feel like many of these [fairy tales] are really silly. I had a lot of fun while I was writing them. They were a way for my brain to relax and have fun when I’m working hard on an essay that is very difficult to write. I went to these fairy tales and found solace. In the world of a fairy tale, you know, anything is possible, and I got all of my toys back and I could play into whatever I want. I could build as big of a world as I want or as small a world as I want. I don’t know if I learned something new while writing this book. But I also think that’s because I didn’t write it as a book. I wrote these as individual pieces and then put them together.
The Triton: My last question is what do you want your readers to get from your work, especially readers who have been reading your work for some time?
Hoàng: I want them to have fun and enjoy it in a way that my other work requires work for the reader. The book is very – what was it that Matthias Folina said – light entertainment? This is my version of light entertainment. It’s not to say that there is nothing serious in here, but it’s a collection of fun fairy tales that rethink fairy tales and like to rethink a lot of things. I do hope that people look at this and think about gender roles and gendered expectations and, what they think a fairy tale should do or ought to be. It still continues to challenge the form of what fairy tale is and what short story is and what all of the genre things are. But I also hope it just makes people smile and they like to get a few laughs, even if they’re, you know, at dad jokes.
Cydney Macon is the Triton’s Editor and Chief