Discussing Identity and Influence with Ira Sukrungruang

By: Kaitlin O’Meara, Copy Editor

This past Tuesday Oct. 21, the Canisius Contemporary Writer Series brought Ira Sukrungruang to Canisius to speak with English and creative writing students before a reading with the larger community. As a Thai-American writer, he talked extensively about identity and how it influences his writing, and gave advice to young writers on how to sustain a literary life. 

Sukrungruang got his B.A. in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and his MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University, and is now the Richard L. Thomas professor of creative writing at Kenyon College. The conversation began centered around how he started writing and how he found his passion within it. He mentioned how he was originally accepted to college on probation, which was a wake-up call for him to figure it out and “find [his] path.” After taking a class with Kent Haruf, he was encouraged to pursue creative nonfiction to think about and process his lived experiences so that he could return to writing fiction, which was his original passion. 

In doing this, he started really thinking about the experiences that his parents went through that shaped their lives, which in turn shaped his. Sukrungruang noted that “you carry it with you, [you are] born with inherited unhappiness,” and that he had to unpack the ideas of belonging and displacement that are tied to both his and his parents’ identities. He attributes the storytelling of his parents to the way in which he now writes and tells his own stories. Though he didn’t come from “western literary tradition,” he mentioned that his family still deeply valued story and the importance of communication, as these were the ways in which they could talk about their life in Thailand before coming to America. 

Sukrungruang also mentioned the ways in which his bilingualism is seen in his writing, as many literary figures who are bilingual often have a different perspective on writing in terms of how they write in one language versus the other. He noted that he finds the differences most strongly in his poetry, where it often feels more natural to write in Thai than in English, as well as when talking about Thailand, as he feels like that writing is fragmented, much like how he feels fragmented from Thailand. English was Sukrungruang’s second language, which he did not learn until early elementary school, as all he spoke at home was Thai. He did talk, however, about the way in which reading helped him learn English, as all he would do when he was at home alone was read, leading him towards a career in writing – which he did not even consider until after graduating from undergrad. 

As a professor, Sukrungruang also talked about teaching writing and the concept of “literary citizenship,” which is something that he teaches to his senior seminar students. He teaches ways in which students can continue to be involved in the literary community and the literary world after college, by bringing in writers who are not academics to show that there are ways to continue writing without becoming an author. 

During the reading with the larger campus community, Sukrungruang mentioned how he “love[s] being in [a] community where word[s are] valued, where stories are valued.” Though during this event he focused more on reading his piece, many themes that he brought up during the talk were once again seen. This reading focused more on how he writes rather than what or why he writes, but he highlighted the importance of writing and seeing where the story takes you, rather than endlessly revising to get to a place where you’ve lost half of what made the story special in the first place.

Though I am not much of a creative writer, I found that his thoughts on writing are something that could be helpful to all kinds of writers – because, as he discussed with literary citizenship, you don’t have to be an author to be a writer. Language is so vital to us, as much for communication as it is purely for connection. Thank you to Dr. Mick Cochrane for bringing Ira Sukrungruang to Canisius to remind us all of the importance and beauty of writing.