Listen to Ocean Vuong talk about Hartford and Literature on “Shelf Talker,” an audio file from CT Museum’s Connecticut’s Bookshelf exhibit, 2024.
Text Version…
Hartford and Literature – Ocean Vuong
Harford is a central figure in American letters. We see the home of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe—Wallace Stevens, of course. And so many students of literature must be familiar, I think, with the city, as was I. But in the 20th century, and particularly the 21st century, Hartford is very different than the Hartford of the writers I just mentioned. And I wanted to capture my version of the city—and also pay homage to it—because it taught me a great deal about America at-large and New England in general.
The close proximity, the clustering of the region wherein you can be in Hartford, for example, and drive anywhere for 25 minutes and you would be in the middle of a field of tobacco. You could be in incredibly lush farmland, or you can be among mansions. And what happened for me as a writer and an artist was that Hartford was a microcosm of the country. You didn’t have to travel five, six hours to see something else. You sometimes see something else by getting lost. You can bump into a total different community and demographic in the region. And I think that is something incredibly unique in the American landscape.
I was by fate, I suppose, lucky enough to have landed in Hartford, Connecticut, especially when so many Vietnamese American immigrants would end up in the sort of diasporic meccas like Houston, Florida, and, of course, Southern California. But for some reason, I was here and I owe a lot of my imagination and my reckoning, for better and for worse, of this country, to being a Hartfordian.