Emma Baum, Special to The Denisonian–
Seated among the Andean and Amazonian artifacts of the Denison Museum’s current exhibit, over 30 students, faculty members, and local patrons of the arts gathered Wednesday, Feb. 14 to welcome 2023 Great Lakes College Association Prize winners Tsering Yangzom Lama and Lars Horn to campus. Introduced to the audience by Professor Margot Singer of the Department of English, the authors dedicated most of the hour-long event to reading excerpts from their prize-winning books, and answering audience questions about craft, process, and inspiration.
Before their careers, Lama nor Horn set out to be an author.
“I was racking up all of the credits to do a philosophy double major with international relations,” Lama said of her time as an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia. “But then I took a creative writing course, just as an elective, and the professor told me to apply for the major. And I just thought, Okay, fine, I’ll give it a shot. I didn’t think I would get in and I did get in.”
Born in Kathmandu, Nepal, and raised in Vancouver, Canada from the age of 12, Lama went on to receive a B.A. in creative writing and international relations, before fully devoting herself to writing during her master’s program at Columbia University. Her debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, was published in May of 2022, and in addition to being awarded the 2023 GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction and the Banff Mountain Award for Fiction & Poetry, has been nominated for eight awards in fiction, provocative writing, and debut novels.
The child of two artists, Horn was encouraged as a student at the University of Edinburgh to pursue a degree that would lead to a traditionally stable career.
“My parents had struggled with the whole arts and the money and finances, and they said, do a degree where you might get a job,” Horn said. “And so I did French and Russian. So I did like modern foreign languages and it was thought that that could probably get me into translation, or maybe even ambassadorial work that is much more rigid.”
It ended up being that love of languages and background in the arts that forged Horn’s unique writing style. Their debut book Voice of the Fish, published in June of 2022, is an essay collection that explores themes of identity, legend, and connection through a uniquely braided structure. In addition to the 2023 GLCA New Writers Award for Non-Fiction, the book has also won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award.
“I love to collect. I’ll just read a lot and collect anecdotes or strange mentions of something, and I just think ‘that might be useful’,” Horn said, describing the wide variety of facts and anecdotes they combine to create their essays. “I just think of myself as somebody with a lot of museum cases. I just sort of put things there and wonder when they’ll next come to be of use.”
Lama also relies heavily on research, to create a foundation rooted in historical accuracy that she can build her fictional narratives on.
“It took me a long time to put the pieces together and to get enough of the detail where I felt like I could recreate the worlds of these characters,” Lama said. “And also given that Tibetan history is actively being erased or rewritten by our colonizers, I felt it was really important for me to do a good job, in a sense that this book is a form of history itself. Even though it’s fiction, it is a work of history.”
Telling the stories of Tibetans is a cause close to Lama’s heart. She is Tibetan herself, and the displacement she has experienced as a result of conflict within the country’s borders has influenced her work both as an author and an advocate.
“I feel like I’m from nowhere in a sense. But I feel like that’s a very modern condition, a lot of people feel like they’re from nowhere,” said Lama. “ If you’ve known loss, then you understand a lot of other people who have known loss. I was recently in France, for instance, talking at a festival, and I met with some readers who are not Tibetan, and not French, from Sub-Saharan Africa, and who, reading the book, felt like this was their community, and felt like they were Tibetan.”
Lama is one of the co-founders of LakharDiaries, an online platform where young Tibetans across the world can connect over Tibetan food, clothing, and language among other things, in solidarity with those still in the country fighting cultural oppression.
While Lama uses her writing to explore her Tibetan heritage, Horn’s essays often dive into their experiences with their transness– sometimes literally.
“I think my love of water really does come from how I try and navigate being in a body from which I feel sort of disjointed to and it intersects with my transness,” Horn said, reflecting on the references to the aquatic that can be found in much of their work. “When you’re swimming, there’s a lot of sensory deprivation. Suddenly, rather than having to navigate that exteriority of the body you get to enjoy selfhood as an interiority that radiates.”
In the wake of their successful debuts, both authors have ambitious projects on the horizon. Lama is in her third year of research on a more fantastical novel, taking place in Tibet along the Silk Road over one thousand years ago. Horn is also looking beyond the mundane in their upcoming book that combines writings about NASA’s Voyager probes and space exploration with ancient burial rites. For the time being, though, the pair will be making appearances at a number of other regional universities. As for their visit to Denison, Horn had high praise.
“There’s something I think that slightly borders on the holy about universities, which sounds maybe a little idealistic, but I really love that there’s a place for curiosity, learning, investigation, and hopefully, at its best community,” Horn said.