Thomas Dai is the author of the essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow, published earlier this year. Other recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, Longreads, and elsewhere. Born and raised in East Tennessee, Thomas now lives in the Inland Pacific Northwest, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Idaho. You can find out more about him and his work at thomasndai.com.
I had the pleasure of staying at a residency with Thomas Dai, at Playa Summer Lake, Oregon, for just a few days this past July. He urged me to explore the natural landscape of the playa, walking the muddied surface of the disappearing lake with me before taking me on a circuitous photo walk in the grassland nearby. Our conversations about the creative impulse, his love of insects, and our shared Chinese heritage made for the starting point of this interview.
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Danielle Shi: In your stunning debut, a collection of essays, Take My Name, but Say It Slow (W. W. Norton, 2025), published earlier this year, you elucidate your personal connection to maps and mapmaking. You begin with an exploration of your name’s particular geographies, starting by naming the thing, so to speak, then giving to it a sense of place—using your love for cartography as an anchoring mechanism. Could you share with us how naming has functioned in relation to space for you? How does your experience of identity evolve from a dual understanding of the map as a guide to somewhere-else, and a source of knowledge upon which to build the self?
Thomas Dai: As a child, I had a pretty intense obsession with geography and maps. I think one offshoot of this was that I started thinking about my life as a collection of places, a collection that really begins with my name. My parents named me 诺成 in Chinese, which is a derivation of Knoxville, TN, the city where I grew up. The title essay of my book digs into that connection, both as a means of introducing myself to the reader—of saying: this is my name, let me tell you about it—and as a way to show that even the simplest approaches to documenting identity (in this case: “naming the thing,” as you put it) quickly get entangled in questions of race, belonging, and for me in particular, place. I wanted to show that both mapping and naming work by approximation—they show you the surface of something terribly complex like a territory or a self, but can’t do much more than that.
DS: You received a fellowship to live abroad for a year and document your travels, out of which you made a photo diary, titled Neverwhere. Your writings open up a transcultural world, one in which bodies are moving through space constantly and are not defined so much by any one culture as they are a delicate interweaving. This writing about cultural touchstones helps me to imagine an expansive world in which fluidity, this passing between cultures—while retaining a respect for their original forms—is possible. How did creating a purposeful travelogue while abroad impact your relationship to writing as a form of record? What was its impact on your decision to continue writing, to “turn myself into a writer”?
TD: My parents immigrated from China in the eighties, but I was completely raised in the states, and I grew up in this very American, very suburban, very chase-the-upper-tier-but-wind-up-in-the-middle kinda way. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t an artsy kid; I was definitely gay, which I guess in the South maybe codes you as a little fey and artsy, but my aesthetic and my behavior were both very academic, very wannabe preppy (I wore blazers to class and applied to every Ivy League college). I was definitely introspective in that I kept a journal and was pretty fastidious about my navelgazing, but I never tried writing my own stories or essays until much later, never even practiced the kind of teenage snobbery around music or books that Hua Hsu describes so beautifully in his memoir Stay True.
So when I got this chance after college to just travel for a year through China and write about it, the experience genuinely changed my life. It was like I was rewiring my psyche. I wasn’t just trying to write down what was happening day by day anymore, or to assimilate into my surroundings, I was working on this precious project, this travelogue, this trip I was hellbent on both completing and turning into a story. And to achieve a meaningful travel story, I felt that I needed to expose myself to all these shifting cultural, historical, and literary touchpoints that you’re describing. I suppose most second generation Asian Americans are born into some version of this hybrid culture, but then we compartmentalize and start to organize ourselves into different chambers. That year was the first time I consciously tried to just move through and not sort all of my own admixture and convergence.
DS: In your road travel essay “Driving Days,” you cross the United States while taking inspiration from Nabokov’s legacy, the trials of queer love, and a nebulous idea of Asian America. Throughout your travels, you integrate elements of each of these sources into your writings about identity, and manage to chart your own course. Tell us more about your “own invented America,” as you describe it.
TD: Just as my experience of transiting China wound up delivering me into this cacophony of voices, not all of them Chinese, I think that road essay is about trying to perform the same exercise back in America. Reinvention often starts with defamiliarization, and so I found it helpful to plan my route not in accordance with my sense of comfort or the American places I knew best, but by following Nabokov’s itinerary and trying to read the landscape through his lens. So the essay is really about layered perspectives: the Russian immigrant’s perspective on America, the ecological perspective of the butterflies that Nabokov and I collected, the perspectives of the other travelers and sundry hometown heroes I met, and my own perspective, too, which is there to try and make some sense of it all. Of course, I don’t actually come away with a concrete “America” to shill for, unless that “America” is again this piebald, prolix, difficult to categorize and encompass thing . . . an America of bad Grindr dates and Lycaenid blues.
DS: You taught a course on Queer Studies at your university, devoting a chapter of your book to such “Queer Cartographies.” How did this process of mapping queer desire originate for you? How does the exploring of personal points of reference by queer lives, and the idea of queer space and its moments, influence your teaching and writing?
TD: Just as I’ve always thought of my Asian American “identity” as geographically strange, a little slippery, I think I’ve instinctively had the same relationship to my queerness. I don’t really know where to place it, or where it wants me to go. In the class I taught on queer spaces, we talked a lot about how in the American consciousness, there are these mostly urban spaces that are made or marketed as “safe” or “free” for queers while lots of other places—whole continents—get styled as giant, oppressive closets. (Jack Halberstam, one of the theorists I assigned, refers to this trope as “metronormativity.”) I began that essay with a quasi-critical interest in deconstructing this binary between “queer” and “straight” spaces; I wanted to write about queer experiences I and others had had which felt “out of place” on that imagined spectrum, like camping with a boyfriend in the woods by I-40, or voyeuristically watching two Chinese soldiers sharing some homosocial bliss. These sorts of uncageable phenomena are endlessly interesting to me as a writer. I’m drawn to writing about queerness—and occasionally, queer theory—mostly because both these things, for me, are about the search for freedom. As an ideal, freedom can have a rather nationalist or neoliberal connotation, but in literature, I think it’s almost always good to feel free, or as free as you can, and to share that freedom with others.
DS: On the drive together down an empty highway, you came to share with me your interest in film, as well as the work of directors like Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-Wai, and Chen Kaige. Are there any directors whose work you find particularly engaging, or whose visual representations influence your writing?
TD: Maybe “interest” isn’t the right word for it, but appreciation? Wonderment? I have no idea how the filmmakers you just named create the kinds of image-worlds that they do, but watching their films does make me want to write. Maybe it’s because when I am writing about myself, as I usually am, I often replay memories in my head in order to bring them into focus or to try and see them anew. I’m drawn to films that have a poetic, impressionistic quality to them, as if shot through the mind’s eye, not the camera’s. Kar-Wai’s Happy Together definitely fits that bill. Also, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, of course. All these films are also in some sense about a fatedly interlinked pair of lovers. So if it’s the aesthetic experience of the director’s or cinematographer’s vision which initially draws me in, it’s the romance—the occasional melodramatic poignancy of these films—that makes them resonate for me.
DS: As a practice, photography often dovetails with writing for you. How has your practice of photography changed over the years? Is there a logic to how you assemble your images and writing, when combining the two? How does each form of art nourish the other for you, and do you see yourself incorporating photography into any future writing projects, in any shape or form?
TD: I think I see photography as a supplement to writing, not as its own independent art practice. Back when I first got a camera in college, I brought it around everywhere with me and took hundreds of photos a day. Sometimes I took pictures as a form of indexing (like if I saw a piece I liked in a museum and wanted to quickly preserve its name and biodata), and sometimes because I’d serendipitously come upon an arrangement of forms that gave me pleasure (bugs and other detritus, usually). For a while, I got very into placing texts and images side by side, or weaving photographs into essays, but I’ve lately pulled away from that, mostly because I think I’m trying to write essays that are slower and also leaner, and playing with photography in a text tends to feel additive to me. Also, I just take fewer pictures than I used to . . . This isn’t to say I won’t try another photography-infused project one day—I know I definitely will! I’m just writing more toward an interior place right now.
