In her memoir Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir, Linda Trinh says she had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet, she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but what were her beliefs? Via collection of essays, Linda plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker.
Linda Trinh is a Vietnamese Canadian author of nonfiction and fiction for adults and children. Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (non) Buddhist Memoir is her first book for adults. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Room, and Prairie Fire. She has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. Her award-winning early chapter book series, The Nguyen Kids, explores Vietnamese culture and identity with elements of the supernatural, spirituality, and social justice woven in.
Lori Sebastianutti is a writer and teacher from Stoney Creek, Ontario. Her essays have been published in Canadian and American journals, including The Hamilton Review of Books, The Humber Literary Review, The New Quarterly, Nurture, Porcupine Literary, Serotonin Poetry, and Broadview Magazine, among others. Her award-winning essay “Cutting Ties and Letting Go” was published in An Anthology of Canadian Birth Stories, and her essay “Notes for the Babysitter” is forthcoming in So Heavy a Weight: Creative Writers on Women’s Reproductive Health from Fulcrum Publishing.
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LS: Congratulations on the publication of your first book for adults! How did the writing of your children’s book series inform how you approached this memoir? What were the main differences in the writing,querying, and publishing experience?
LT: I wrote the memoir first and I was actually still querying it when I signed the contract for my early chapter book series, The Nguyen Kids.
In having the new kids’ series to work on, I could shift my focus away from obsessively waiting for responses from publishers. I learned to adopt both persistence and patience for the publishing process. Query, query, query. Wait. And in the meantime, focus on what I could control – my writing.
LS: You begin the memoir with a compelling question. “Is this it?” How did questions about a life beyond the mundane start you down your spiritual and writing path?
LT: For me, the spiritual path is the intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the mundane with the divine. What would an intentional journey be, one that is tied to having a sense of meaning in one’s life and making connections? The “Is this it?” may differ person to person. I define it for me as spiritual nourishment, which is linked to creative nourishment.
LS: Seeking Spirit takes the reader on a glorious ride to various parts of the world through your travels to Vietnam, Egypt, Greece, and China. What was it like revisiting these voyages through the lens of storytelling?
LT: In Vietnam, I have visited Ha Long Bay near Hanoi in the north a couple times. It’s a place that is so otherworldly in its mists and strange island formations AND the place most like home I’ve felt anywhere in the world. Fun fact, the cover of the book is a picture of Ha Long Bay.
When I’m feeling untethered, I bring my mind back to one of these extraordinary moments like Ha Long Bay, and I breathe deeply. Revisiting these sacred spaces through writing hopefully inspires the reader to revisit their own extraordinary moments.
LS: One thing I appreciated about Seeking Spirit was your willingness to explore spirituality as it relates to grief. What do you hope your reader takes from reading about your experiences of loss?
LT: I write about when I faced a great loss, I also became spiritually lost. Both the presence and the absence of the divine feminine during different times of my life have taught me hard lessons, which is perhaps relatable to readers. You don’t always get what you want, in life, or, in spirit. AND you can gather the strength and faith to keep going, to keep seeking.
LS: Like you, I write about faith, and we both recognize the need to treat this delicate subject matter with nuance and care. Did you encounter any road bumps in the publishing process due to the nature of your book’s topic?
LT: Let’s just say the publishing process was looooong with starts and stops and times I didn’t know what to do next.
It took me one and a half years to query the memoir. I started with querying agents in Canada. I got a few partial requests and one full request. Everyone passed. So I decided to submit to independent publishers in Canada that were open to unsolicited manuscripts. I had multiple presses consider the full manuscript. As publishers responded and passed on the work, the consistent feedback I got was that the writing was strong yet ultimately, the book was not a fit. Perhaps it was the spiritual nature of the book and possible challenges with how to market or position the book.
In submitting to Guernica Editions – MiroLand Imprint, I was hopeful they would take a chance on me. And so my book baby is where it’s supposed to be.
LS: Joan Didion famously said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Did writing this book help you discern what “spirit” means to you today?
LT: You may be able to relate Lori – part of the challenge and the thrill of writing CNF is discovering the form to hold the ideas and the events in place, to make meaning out of experience. Only when I landed on the structure, that’s when it was revealed to me – what I’m trying to understand.
Writing at the end of chapter 2, “My travels through the sacred inform how I live and compel me to ask these questions of myself. I may ask these questions all my life. These questions may not have answers, but the connection to spirit lies in the questioning.
What is my origin story?
How am I the hero of my life?
What happens at the end?”