Week 3 Poem of the Week: “How Fairydust Stains” by Catherine Yuefang Tang

How Fairydust Stains

Rub fairydust off your chin,
but you can’t rid it from the house.
It stains: that’s what it’s made of,
a colour you can’t define but exists nonetheless.
It stains and makes stories.
Once you rub it off you’ll never qualify
to feel the density of its molecules again.
My characters forgive but my story doesn’t –
probably because there aren’t any fairies in there,
though I never know if fairies
by definition, are supposed to be tolerant
to abusive manipulations you take out of a laundry,
a dumb machine rants to rid fairydust.
I wonder how you insist seeing the light fluttering
how it makes you sneeze,
how its tinkles give you goosebumps,
how you remain unaware that you are never invited
from the beginning, a mist of mornings
in which you pace around the floor
further hardened by years, during which we grow
apart, while you still can’t see the changes.
You used to tell me stories where fairies were nice
but I have a different bunch of them,
and there are always
different ways to tell stories,
and every story is a valid one but mine are better than yours
because you use them and write them in ink and whispers
while I let them use me and that’s how
there’s fairydust staining all your desperate walls.
And stories aren’t just for bedtime.
And stories sometimes keep people awake,
and that, is fine.

Image credits: Keira Quirk

After reading her poem, I sat down with Catherine over Zoom to chat about her writing and inspirations!

First of all, Catherine offered up an insight into the themes which affect her writing process, highlighting first and foremost how she and her mother have an ongoing conflict regarding her love for writing and poetry, as her mother “does not really appreciate the fact that I am doing creative writing, and she doesn’t like fiction in general – these conflicts escalate quickly”.

Despite this, however, Catherine writes often, and indeed her writing builds on the tensions she experiences in her own home, often using different types of conflict as a backdrop to her plotlines: “I write both poetry and prose – I wrote a novel, and I’m turning it into a game, which is basically the subject of the conflict [with her mother], because that is an ongoing project, and I’m super passionate and invested in it.

“Most of my novels or short stories or poetry are all about war, especially about World War Two, and also they tend to focus a lot not on the military conflict itself but more on the everyday struggles of people in times of conflict, and how they manage their lives, their family lives, loyalties, romance, etc.”

She classifies her writing as perhaps “more YA”, but highlights that her research interest during her studies in general happen to be “around the same topic [as her own writing]”, as she’s mainly interested in researching “World War Two children’s literature.”

Image credits: Keira Quirk

Catherine is also the President of the Poetry and Prose Society and is involved with the Cambridge Blackbirds Poetry Society, and she says she loves “being part of the literary community, and I’d say most of the support they provide is that they give really good prompts, and they really motivate me to write something every week, and to attend their workshop. They have specific themes each week, so I can’t just use some poems I’ve already written earlier.”

As the President of the former society, she also notes that she has to come up with these prompts herself sometimes, which “keeps me in the loop of poetry writing, because otherwise I’ll be mainly writing my own game/novel, so I wouldn’t be writing as much poetry – I’d be less motivated in general. Blackbirds just gives me an opportunity to really explore poetry themes outside of my usual domain.”

We dwelled a little on how sometimes it can be difficult to maintain your creativity over the course of a Cambridge term – we all know how easy it is to get caught up in work! – and indeed, Catherine points out how that same creative spark was affected during the pandemic, too. Catherine highlights how she was often very inspired by her personal life and events while she was doing her undergrad at UCL, but then “starting from the pandemic, where I took my gap year and stayed at home, and now at Cambridge, I feel like I draw less and less reference in poetry from my life.

“I’m not sure if it’s the pandemic, which made my life a lot less interesting, because I don’t have any personal themes to explore, or if it’s because I’m focusing so much on my novel that I don’t have the capacity to think about other things deeply enough – I don’t really know which one it is.”

Image credits: Keira Quirk

She describes Ray Bradbury as one of her favourite writers – Fahrenheit 451 is one of her favourite novels: “I care a lot about freedom of writing or freedom of publication – for example, when I write about WW2, I write a lot about how books were burned in Nazi Germany. That’s a constant theme that I want to explore in depth. It’s important to me furthermore because my mother has such strong opinions on what books someone should or shouldn’t read – you shouldn’t limit how someone uses their intellectual capacity or creative ability.

“Another writer that I really like is Jeanette Winterson – I’ve read quite a lot of her novels. I wouldn’t say that she has a strong influence on the themes I write about, or on my style of writing, but her personal story is very inspiring to me. She’s also part of the LGBT community, she’s very brave, and she stayed true to herself throughout the struggles she had with her family and society at the time.”

That’s a wrap for our Poem of the Week feature for this week – if you, too, would like to see an original poem of yours featured right here in The Tab, we would love to hear from you: submissions are open now, just email your poem to [email protected] (submission guidelines outlined in the original article here). We can’t wait to hear from you!

Feature image credits: Keira Quirk

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